HinesSight

Weak jobs report points to Republican failings

Not as many jobs were created in May, 2012 as were expected. This is bad news for the unemployed. But Obama isn't to blame, notwithstanding Republican glee over the misery of Americans without a job.

As I noted before, the question to ask is whether the United States is better off after the past several years of Republican obstructionism, where the #1 goal of the G.O.P. has been to stop Obama from winning a second term.

So it doesn't make sense to blame Obama for a weak recovery, since after the 2010 election he hasn't been able to get key economic stimulus bills through the filibuster-crazy Republicans in the Senate and the Nobama (Nothing for Obama) sit-on-their-handers in the House.

Congressional Republicans, it isn't fair to chastize Obama for failed economic policies when you haven't allowed him to implement them. If anyone should be chastized, it is the Republicans who have put politics above country.

As a New York Times story says:

“He needs to call the Republicans out,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. “He needs to remind people he got zero help rescuing the economy when he came to office, and on these new jobs bills, the Republicans are simply trying to run out the clock.”

What Republicans want to do is repeat the failures of the Bush administration that got us into our current economic mess. If tax cuts for the wealthy, military budget increases, and lack of regulations are such great ideas for stimulating the economy, why didn't they work during the Bush years?

Hopefully, in Obama's second term he'll get a better chance to become the president that Republicans are criticizing, yet he hasn't had the opportunity to be.

Reality is respected on this here blog

Reality is a wonderful thing. Actually, the only thing. Show me something that isn't real, and I'll say "You've shown me nothing."

And that's what some commenters on this blog want to do: pretend they've got a fact in their hand when all they possess is an empty palm of subjectivity. 

Which, I'll admit, is something real.

But reality comes in two main varieties, communal/objective and individual/subjective. Both are wonderful, admirable, essential, inescapable. It's when an attempt is made to pass off one as the other that I, as moderator of this blog, rule "No way!"

Global warming and Obama's birth certificate are a couple of examples. Human-caused global warming is a fact. So is President Obama being born in Hawaii. 

These sorts of facts are communal. They can't be hijacked by anybody. Or at least, they shouldn't be. Politicians, almost always right-wing in this country, do try to proclaim what a fact is without demonstrable evidence to back up their assertion.

Such as...North Carolina legislators hope to pass a law requiring that global warming science be ignored when calculating the future sea level on the state's shores. Crazy.

I'm not interested in contributing to that sort of disrespect of our communal reality.

So that's why I don't publish comments that are clearly at odds with the facts. If a commenter has solid evidence that human-caused global warming isn't happening, publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. Maybe you'll get a Nobel prize. Likewise, if a commenter has solid evidence that Obama's birth certificate is fake, release it. Maybe you'll guarantee Romney's election.

But if all you have are links to some crazy non-factual web sites, forget about using this blog as your soap box. 

Because what the world needs now (and always) are people willing to agree on basic facts, even if they disagree about what the facts mean. This is how political discourse moves from meaningless name-calling to reasonable debate.

The Earth is warming. Because of what we humans are doing. These facts have to be agreed upon before we can discuss what this means. Maybe you think global warming will benefit people. OK, I disagree. Let's each bring out our arguments.

But if you want to ignore the scientific consensus about global climate change, there's no basis for an intelligent discussion. 

If we each have seen a movie, we can talk about what we liked and disliked about it. However, if I demand that you seriously consider my opinion about a movie that I'm clueless about, you have a right to say, "You're acting crazy."

Craziness can be fun, but not when it is masquerading as reality. That way lies madness, when someone demands that other people embrace their unreal view of the world. If you like country music, fine. I don't. We can agree to disagree about our likes. 

Opinions are different from facts. You're entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. Sometimes the line is blurry between them. With issues like global warming and Obama's birthplace, the line is clear. 

Which is why I won't allow comments on this blog that try to pass off opinion as fact, when the facts are crystal-clear. Yes, facts can change. Until this occurs, though, a fact is a fact, and an opinion is an opinion.

Human-caused global warming is a fact. So is Obama's U.S. citizenship. If you want to say otherwise on the WWW, do it someplace other than this blog.

 

Alan Simpson trashes Republican extremism in Zakaria interview

Alan Simpson is a Republican who was a Senator from Wyoming for 18 years. He's an appealingly crusty, straight-talking guy. He's the sort of conservative who now is looked upon by super-far-right Tea Party types as -- gasp! -- a moderate.

Today I enjoyed listening to a podcast of his recent interview on Fareed Zakaria's GPS program. He appeared with his fellow co-chair of what's often called the Simpson-Bowles (or Bowles-Simpson) commission, Erskine Bowles. 

(Full transcript can be read on the CNN site.)

Simpson strikes me as a much more reasonable version of Ron Paul. Equally blunt, but without the craziness. Which doesn't mean that I agree with all of his deficit-cutting recommendations. I like him more than The Daily Kos does, though.

Perhaps Simpson is off the mark on reforming Social Security, a Daily Kos gripe.

Yet he and Bowles correctly realize that getting the federal budget under control, long-term, is going to require a balanced approach: some cuts to programs; some increases in taxes; some changes to how taxes are collected, a.k.a. tax reform (eliminating excessive "tax expenditures" which benefit special interests).

And when it comes to today's extremist Republican politicians, long-time G.O.P. member Simpson nails what's wrong with his political party. From the Zakaria interview:

ZAKARIA: Senator Simpson, you've seen what's been going on these last few months. The House actually voted on the Simpson-Bowles proposal and it went down decisively. 

Paul Ryan, the leader of the House on fiscal issues, I suppose, said that Simpson-Bowles was the wrong way to go because there weren't enough spending cuts and there were too many tax increases.

What was your reaction? That's your party.

SIMPSON: Well, I think my party and I have different views on a lot of things. I guess I'm known as a "rhino" now, which means a Republican in name only because I guess of social views perhaps or common sense would be another one which seems to escape members of our party.

Abortion is a horrible thing, but, for heaven's sakes, a deeply intimate and personal decision and men legislators shouldn't even vote on it. Gay-lesbian issues, we're all human beings. We're all God's children. What is that?

And for heaven's sakes, you have Grover Norquist wandering the Earth in his white robes saying that if you raise taxes one penny, he'll defeat you. He can't murder you, he can't burn your house, the only thing he can do to you, as an elected official, is defeat you for reelection.

And if that means more to you than your country when we need patriots to come out in a situation when we're in extremity, you shouldn't even be in Congress.

ZAKARIA: But talk about Ryan particularly, because what I'm struck by is the Simpson-Bowles plan calls for an awful lot of spending cuts and, yet, those weren't enough. 

SIMPSON: Well, Erskine can tell you we don't call for -- You can't cut spending your way out of this hole. You can't grow your way out of this hole and you can't tax your way out of this hole "Put that in your pipe and smoke it," we tell these people. 

This is madness. If you want to be a purest, go somewhere on a mountain top and praise the east or something, but if you want to be in politics, you learn to compromise and you learn to compromise an issue without compromising yourself. Show me a guy who won't compromise and I'll show you a guy with rock for brains.

Federal spending hasn't risen much during Obama's presidency

Well, one more Republican untruth has been demolished by facts.

Contrary to widespread belief (including me, I have to admit), federal spending has increased much less under Obama's leadership than under the last four presidents -- including Reagan.

Check out Rex Nutting's excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch, "Obama spending binge never happened."

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Here's the key to understanding why so many people believe the opposite.

Why do people think Obama has spent like a drunken sailor? It’s in part because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the federal budget.

What people forget (or never knew) is that the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress. The president only begins to shape the budget in his second year. It takes time to develop a budget and steer it through Congress — especially in these days of congressional gridlock.

The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress.

Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations.

Charts don't lie.

Oregon judges should be appointed, not elected

I have no idea why Oregon voters, or those in any state, should be electing judges.

There has to be a better way to fill vacancies on the Oregon Supreme Court than to have voters, most of whom are clueless about both the judicial system and the qualifications of candidates, electing judges.

Last Tuesday in Oregon's primary election, the best qualified candidate, Timothy Sercombe, got the least amount of votes among the three candidates. So the other two, Portland attorney Nena Cook and Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Richard Baldwin, will face off on the November ballot.

A likely reason for this is disturbing.

In the weeks leading up to last Tuesday's primary election, Timothy Sercombe looked to be a shoo-in for Oregon Supreme Court justice. 

Sercombe won the backing of all 10 of the editorial boards of Oregon newspapers that made endorsements. He won a preference poll of attorneys -- conducted by the Oregon State Bar -- by a landslide over his two opponents. 

A judge on the Oregon Court of Appeals for the past five years, Sercombe also was following the well-worn path of his predecessors: Five of the state Supreme Court's current seven justices had served on the Court of Appeals. 

...Beth Bernard, who for years advised candidates on national campaigns before becoming executive director of the Oregon Trial Lawyers Association, thinks Cook won because she's a woman. When given the choice of two men and one woman who all had decades of legal experience, female voters chose the woman, Bernard said. 

"If they all seem qualified, they say, 'I'm going to go with the woman,'" Bernard said. 

And therein lies the problem with races for judgeships, some political observers say: Many voters make their choices not on issues, but on gut feelings or little knowledge of the candidates. 

Voters don't elect judges to the United States Supreme Court. Why should voters be electing judges to the Oregon Supreme Court? It'd be better to use the "merit plan" used by twenty-three states:

Judges are nominated by a nonpartisan commission, and then appointed by the governor. Judges serve a term and then are subject to a retention election, where they run alone, and voters can either approve another term or vote against them.

Currently Oregon is one of fifteen states which elect judges in nonpartisan elections. Since voters don't pay much attention to judges in elections (the Oregonian reported that about a third of those casting ballots skipped voting for the Supreme Court position), it doesn't make sense to have them picked by what amounts to a crapshoot.

In the past few years I attended two hearings of the Oregon Court of Appeals. I got to see TImothy Sercombe ask cogent questions of the attorneys arguing land use cases. I've read the opinions he wrote on the cases.

I didn't agree with all of his reasoning. But I came away highly impressed with Sercombe and was looking forward to him being on the Oregon Supreme Court. Or at least making a runoff for the November election.

Are you better off today than when Mitch McConnell said...?

Listening to POTUS (great political talk programming) on satellite radio recently, a caller had a great response to the usual Republican line, "Are you better off today than four years ago, when Obama was elected president?"

He said the question should be:

Are you better off today than two years ago, when Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president"?

The biggest problem our country has is Republican obstructionism.

The not-so G.O.P. dislikes Obama and his policies so much, it seems that Republicans would rather have the economy hurt, than pass legislation which would make things better.

McConnell's statement made that clear. Republicans aren't serious about working with Democrats and the White House to solve national problems. Their sole selfish goal is more political power.

Marijuana rolls into center of Oregon Attorney General race

Ellen Rosenblum would be a much better Attorney General for Oregon than Dwight Holton, not least because of her respect for our state's voter-approved medical marijuana act, which Holton almost certainly would continue to undermine -- notwithstanding politically-inspired attempts to downplay his previous attacks against the act.

I hope she wins tomorrow in the Democratic primary. Rosenblum is the choice of progressives, while a poll showed that Holton is favored only by the most conservative Democrats.

A few days ago I got an email from a US News and World Report editor who wrote a story analyzing the impact marijuana is having on the Attorney General race (Republicans aren't running a candidate, so likely whoever wins the Dem primary will be the next AG).

Hey Brian,

I just read your blog post endorsing Ellen Rosenblum for AG. I just completed a long feature piece for US News & World Report about the race, focusing partially on its national implications for marijuana activists: 

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/05/10/why-the-oregon-attorney-general-race-has-national-implications-for-marijuana-laws

Thought you and your readers would find it interesting.

Take care,
Simon Owens
Assistant Managing Editor
US News & World Report

Well, I'm pleased to publicize your story on my blog, Simon. Glad to suck up to you. Just keep me in mind next time you need a quote on an Oregon-related story.

Here's some excerpts from Owens' piece.

Oregon has a long and storied history with marijuana. In 1973, the legislature voted to make possession of less than an ounce of pot an infraction with a maximum fine of $100. The legislature then tried to reclassify simple possession as a misdemeanor in 1997, only for voters to reject it in a 1998 ballot initiative.

That same year, a majority of voters approved another ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes, making Oregon one of the first states to do so (this initiative became what is now called the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act). Unlike some states—California, for instance—Oregon does not allow the sale of medical marijuana, but rather allows those granted permission to either grow pot for themselves or designate others to grow it for them.

...If Holton loses on Tuesday, it won't be the first time marijuana activists will claim they were able to tip the scales of an election. In 2010, activists ran ads against Steve Cooley, a Los Angeles District Attorney they considered hostile to medical marijuana dispensaries, when he ran for attorney general of California. He lost by a slim margin, and activists think it was their ads that cost him the election.

Lurking in the background of the Attorney General race is the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act 2012, which would allow personal use/cultivation of marijiuana, and regulate commercial cultivation/sale. It looks like backers of the citizen initiative are on track to get it on the November ballot.

Rosenblum would be a much better fit for Oregon than Holton if the Cannabis Tax Act is passed by voters. Here's what's cited as the best reason for progressives to vote for Rosenblum:

Progressives' top-rated reasons for supporting Ellen Rosenblum:

"A few weeks ago, at the Eugene City Club debate, Dwight Holton, candidate for Oregon Attorney General, picked a fight with medical marijuana patients when he called the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act a “train wreck.” Holton went on to say he would work with Republican legislators who in 2011 introduced legislation that would have effectively gut the 1998 voter-approved law. Holton is the same former US Attorney who authorized raids on Southern Oregon medical marijuana providers last fall, depriving over 200 patients access to their legal medicine. Holton hails from Virginia and only joined the Oregon State Bar in 2009. He has never tried a case in an Oregon State Court. Judge Rosenblum has been a lawyer, prosecutor and Judge in Oregon for 36 years."

"Ellen Rosenblum is Oregon. She knows most facets of the job and has new ideas of improving communication between the Governor, the state agencies and her constituents. She's well-balanced and will be able to work with the Legislature and the Courts better than her opponent. Former AGs Dave Frohnmayer and Hardy Myers endorse her and they both know what it takes to make not just a good AG but a wonderful AG. Vote for Ellen."

Thanks to Obama, I'm going to stop saying "that's so gay!"

Yesterday I was thrilled to learn that President Obama has come out (so to speak) in favor of gay marriage. This is a good move ethically as well as politically. 

Homosexuals are people too, Mitt Romney and fellow gay-bashing Republicans. Recognizing the obvious will energize Obama's base, and it won't cost him many votes since homophobes already plan to vote against him.

Eugene Robinson ends his column on this subject with:

Politically, Obama may have taken a big step toward reclaiming the future.

The magic of hope and change that suffused his 2008 campaign has dissipated after 40 grueling months in office. Obama’s supporters could point to his accomplishments and cite the reasons why Romney would be a poor replacement, but the optimism and excitement were missing.

Obama could have kept silent on gay marriage, and frustrated progressives would still vote for him. Instead, he spoke out when he didn’t have to and took a stance that might hurt him in key states — reminding us how he can surprise and inspire.

Did I just catch a whiff of that hopey-changey stuff in the air?

For sure. I've already vowed to make a change in my habit of blurting out what I now realize is a slur: that's so gay!

Here's an example.

In the past, my wife has tried to get me to buy a Jams World shirt when we've gone to Maui. She likes the Jams World clothing line. High quality; made in Hawaii; kind of expensive, but not super-outrageous given what you get for your money.

Almost universally -- coincidentally, up until yesterday, the day Obama stated his new position on gay marriage -- I've responded to her pointing out a men's Jams World shirt I should consider buying with Oh, no, that's so gay!

Now, I've had good reasons for saying that. Check out the retro Jams World flambe.

lt just isn't me. Most of the time I wear gray and black combinations, often from Hawaii's other cool clothes purveyor, Crazy Shirts. My taste runs more toward a dark-themed macho Chinese dragon or big breaking wave, not pink flowers.

Still, I also like colorful shirts. Yesterday my wife showed me a Jams World shirt that was much more subdued than the one above. I ended up buying it. However...

My first reaction, more from habit than anything else, was to tell her that's so gay when she said, "I like this Jams World shirt." I kept my mouth shut, though. Partly because we were in a public place and I no longer feel comfortable saying that's so gay, in the same way I wouldn't say that's so black. 

And partly because I had just learned about Obama's gay-friendly words a few hours before. I was enthused by them. I felt that the United States had taken a big step toward ending discrimination against homosexuals. 

Which has been a long time coming. 

Back in my high school years, 1962-66, us guys taunted each other with faggot! There weren't any openly gay students in my high school. Any guy who looked or acted too feminine was teased mercilessly. We had essentially zero compassion for gays.

So I was astounded to read what Mitt Romney said about his own (much worse) gay-bashing experience, given that we are almost exactly the same age.

“I don’t remember that incident,” Romney said, laughing. “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case."

Ridiculous. Back in the 1960's attitudes were hugely different toward homosexuals than they are now. Almost certainly Romney is trying to erase and excuse his past, as he so often does.

My past is still with me.

I wasn't so clearly aware of that until yesterday, when I caught myself about to say that's so gay! Yes, it seems that there is a certain gay style, though I can't describe it exactly. Likewise, there is a certain black style, though I also can't describe it exactly.

But my use of that's so gay had a homophobic edge to it. I was afraid of looking like I was gay. I didn't want people to think, "Only a gay guy would wear that shirt." 

Why? Why couldn't I simply say to my wife, that shirt doesn't appeal to me; too pink, too bright?

That's what I'm going to say now. No more that's so gay. Of such small steps revolutions are made. May we have legal gay marriage all across the United States soon.

Here's the Jams World shirt that I bought. I've worn it several times. No one has asked me if I'm gay.

In the unlikely event someone does, I'll respond, "Yes. You must have been able to tell from the Jams World shirt. Very observant. By the way, please support gay marriage. We gays deserve equal rights. Along with nice clothes."

Economic austerity humorously ridiculed in Fiore animation

Austerity to bring about prosperity is a ridiculous economic idea. So I liked how Mark Fiore makes fun of this notion in his News in a Nutshell animation, "Assaulting Austerity," or: "Why events an ocean away matter to you."

Check it out.

You'll never again believe Mitt Romney or other Republicans who say that cutting spending and jobs in a recession is the way to... here's the joke... get more spending and jobs! (Not that you ever should have believed them.)

Hilarious.

Or it would be, if right-wingers weren't so serious about pursuing wacked-out policies that would only benefit the rich. Europe is figuring this out, as Fiore humorously points out. Here's the words to his animation, conveniently shared on his website.

News, in a Nutshell presents . . .

"Assaulting Austerity," or: "Why events an ocean away matter to you."

From left to right to really right, across Europe, the Battle of Austerity rages, with leaders and governments falling everywhere-- from the Netherlands to Greece to France as voters say "NO MORE" to cuts!

It all began as a sure-fire solution to Europe's economic woes, which were blamed on government spending and too much debt.

Never mind the banks, it was the fault of those dastardly government spendaholics.

So belts were tightened, lips were stiffened and boot straps were relied upon as government spending was cut and safety nets snipped.

People who did things for or sold things to the government were out of luck, as demand fell in an already-weakened economy.

Which led to a weaker economy and more unemployment.

But there was a solution!

Belts were tightened, lips were stiffened and boot straps were relied upon as government spending was cut and safety nets snipped.

Which, unfortunately for people who did things for or sold things to the government, led to falling demand and more unemployment in an already-weak economy.

Clearly, more austerity was needed!

So belts were tightened, lips were stiffened and boot straps were relied upon as government spending was cut and safety nets snipped.

(Which, for some odd reason, weakened an already-weak economy.)

Budget-cutting austerity stars like Ireland became basket cases, leading thousands to flee!

As Europe double-dipped into recession and depression, banks here at home remained dangerously exposed to the predicament across the pond.

But never fear, America's wise financial leaders and deficit hawks in Congress have a solution!

Belts will be tightened, lips will be stiffened and boot straps will be relied upon as government spending is cut and safety nets snipped.

Gute nacht, and . . . zut alors.

European Union is a success, no matter what U.S. conservatives say

With the French elections happening today, Adam Gopnik's "Vive La France" piece in the May 7 The New Yorker is timely reading. 

Like so much else in the magazine, it's wonderfully written and soundly reasoned.

The piece touches on a question that baffles me: why conservatives/Republicans in our semi good-old USA have such a distaste for European social democracies. Those nations do a lot of things better than we do.

Like health care. Modern transportation. Making it possible to move up the economic ladder. Providing essential social services to all of their citizens.

At the end of his essay, Gopnik reminds us of sixty million other reasons for those of us on the other side of the Atlantic to offer up a rousing chant of European Union! European Union! European Union! 

To the American right, anything that goes wrong in Europe does so because Europe is wrong, and not because of austerity, because austerity is right.

This anti-European bias is producing an indecent-seeming amount of schadenfreude—on the right but also on the left—about the prospect of the dissolution of the European Union. The potential Franco-German split, Germany’s own ambivalences, the Greek crisis, the fall of the Dutch government, the backslide of the British economy—the tone about all this is oddly punitive here, as though the E.U. had been the product of some Brussels bureaucrat’s utopian folly rather than a miracle of coexistence wrought by a handful of quiet visionaries after more than fifty years of catastrophe.

In thinking about Europe and its union, the number that one needs to keep in mind is not the rate of the euro exchange or the measure of the Greek deficit but a simpler one, of sixty million.

That is the approximate (and probably understated) number of Europeans killed in the thirty years between 1914 and 1945, victims of wars of competing nationalisms on a tragically divided continent. The truth needs re-stating: social democracy in Europe, embodied by its union, has been one of the greatest successes in history.

Like all successes, it can seem exasperatingly commonplace. There is something uninspiring about the compromises and the dailiness of a happy marriage, and something compelling about one that is coming apart: it looks more like the due fate of all things. Yet the truth ought to remain central.

A continent torn by the two most horrible wars in history achieved a remarkable half century of peace and prosperity, based on a marriage of liberalism properly so called (individual freedoms, including the entrepreneurial kind) and socialism rightly so ordered (as an equitable care for the common good).

Any pleasure taken in the failure of Europe to expunge all its demons threatens to become one more way of not having to examine our own. A mild-mannered, European-minded citizen king is, at least, better than a passionately convinced exceptionalist. France, and Europe, learned that lesson the hard way. 

Heartland Institute compares global warming believers to "murderers"

As if we needed more proof that anti-science global warming deniers are wackos, here it is:

Well, when facts, reality, and 98% of the world's leading climate scientists aren't on your side, it looks like the global warming deniers are reduced to disgusting fearmongering and personal insults. Here's what part of the Heartland Institute's press release announcing the billboard campaign said:

May 3, 2012 – Billboards in Chicago paid for by The Heartland Institute point out that some of the world’s most notorious criminals say they “still believe in global warming” – and ask viewers if they do, too.

Heartland’s first digital billboard – along the inbound Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) in Maywood – is the latest effort by the free-market think tank to inform the public about what it views as the collapsing scientific, political, and public support for the theory of man-made global warming. It is also reminding viewers of the questionable ethics of global warming’s most prominent proponents.

“The most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists,” said Heartland’s president, Joseph Bast. “They are Charles Manson, a mass murderer; Fidel Castro, a tyrant; and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Global warming alarmists include Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (who took hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in 2010).

Huh? Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and Osama Bin Laden are/were "global warming's most prominent proponents"? What planet are you spreading your lies on, Heartland Institute?

Al Gore. Barack Obama. The Dalai Lama. Pope Benedict XVI. Desmond Tutu. The Heartland Institute is associating these men, who all accept the truth of human-caused global warming, with the "world's most notorious criminals." 

Andrew Sullivan tells it like it is:

In some ways, this is an almost perfect illustration of what has happened to the "right." A refusal to acknowledge scientific reality; and a brutalist style of public propaganda that focuses entirely on guilt by the most extreme association. 

...Mann and Ornstein are correct. Large sections of the American right are now close to insane as well as depraved. 

The Guardian's Environment Blog says:

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based rightwing thinktank notorious for promoting climate scepticism, has launched quite possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.

And Climate Progress writes:

The Heartland Institute has launched one of the most offensive billboard campaigns in U.S. history. The Chicago-based anti-science think tank is comparing all those who accept climate science — and the journalists who report on it accurately — to Charles Manson, the Unabomber, and Osama Bin Laden.

So true: Republicans are the problem in American politics

Thank you for saying it, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann. The Republicans are the problem.

These respected centrists (Ornstein is with the American Enterprise Institute; Mann with the Brookings Institution) have written a terrific piece in the Washington Post that's based on their forthcoming book.

It's clear, truthful, undeniable. One major political party in the United States has gone wacko, and it isn't the Democratic Party.

Below are some of my favorite parts of the essay.

The mention of habitual Republican use of the filibuster, something new in Senate politics, is right-on. Why does the media say "The Democratic proposal failed to pass by a vote of 53-47 in the Senate"? The bill got a freaking majority! It succeeded in passing, except for the idiotic 60-vote filibuster rule.

As Ornstein and Mann note, reporters should say just that. A majority of Senators voted for the bill, but it didn't become law because of Republican obstructionism. Here's more on that subject.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

...The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

...Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies.The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. 

...The GOP’s evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska called his party “irresponsible” in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. “I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.”

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

...We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.

Global warming deniers are "merchants of doubt"

Facts are facts.

Cigarettes cause lung cancer. Coal-fired power plants cause acid rain. Fossil fuel emissions cause global warming.

There's scientific consensus on the causes of lung cancer, acid rain, and global warming. Unfortunately, there also has been, and still is, a systematic effort to spread lies about these serious problems.

In her book "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming," historian Naomi Oreskes documented how this happened. A review says:

Merchants of Doubt might be one of the most important books of the year. Exhaustively researched and documented, it explains how over the past several decades mercenary scientists have partnered with tobacco companies and chemical corporations to help them convince the public that their products are safe – even when solid science proves otherwise.

These businesses had a goal: to sell cigarettes and chemicals such as DDT. These businesses had a problem: scientists said their products were bad for people. These businesses found a solution: hire scientists to step outside the objective, peer-reviewed scientific academies and spread junk science and misinformation, manufacturing and selling doubt.

...Today, a number of scientists have figured out how to sell doubt in the public consciousness and make money and a reputation in doing so. “Merchants of Doubt” shows how many of these same scientists are still working today on the Grand Poobah of science issues: global warming.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway tell the story of a number of scientists and organizations that they say have established themselves in this practice, but three in particular steal the show – er, charade: Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz, and Fred Singer. Oreskes and Conway contend that each of these scientists developed extensive political networks they then used to begin some of the greatest misinformation campaigns in American scientific history.

Today I listened to a podcast interview of Oreskes on Point of Inquiry. It was simultaneously fascinating and disturbing. 

I learned that fear drives many global warming deniers. It's the same fear that impelled Cold War warriors to see Communism as a much bigger threat than it really was, and to trample civil liberties in their efforts to root out nasty Reds who supposedly were undermining the United States from within.

Amazingly, Oreskes said that rabid anti-science "merchants of doubt" still believe in the Watermelon Theory of modern environmentalists: green without, red within.

Corporate greed of fossil fuel companies is one driver of global warming lies. An irrational fear of government intrusion into people's lives is another driver. If human-caused global warming is a serious problem -- and science tells us that it IS -- then something needs to be done about it.

Oreskes said that even though pollution trading mechanisms based on the free market worked with acid rain, and carbon trading would work equally well with global warming, fear of big government leads global warming deniers to spread lies, apparently figuring that their supposedly virtuous libertarian ends justify sleazy untruthful means.

The good news is that the American public is seeing through the lies: 75 percent of Americans favor regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant; 60 percent support a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

A new national survey confirms strong public support for funding renewable energy research, regulating carbon pollution, and signing a global treaty to slash emissions. The study, conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, found a remarkable 75% of Americans support “regulating carbon dioxide (the primary greenhouse gas) as a pollutant.”

The survey’s results are counter to widely held assumptions among the media and politicians, but consistent with recent polling. The poll found:

• 63 percent of Americans support “signing an international treaty that requires the United States to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide 90 percent by the year 2050“!
• By a margin of 3 to 1 — 61 percent to 20 percent — Americans say they would be more likely to vote for a political candidate who supports a “revenue neutral” tax shift, increasing taxes on fossil fuels, and reducing the federal income tax by an equal amount.
• 61 percent said they support holding the fossil fuel industry responsible for “hidden costs we pay for citizens who get sick from polluted air and water, military costs to maintain access to foreign oil, and the environmental costs of spills and accidents.”
• By 3 to 1 — 58 percent to 17 percent — Americans say “protecting the environment … improves economic growth and provides new jobs” vs those who say it “reduces economic growth and costs jobs.”
• Asked “When there is a conflict between environmental protection and economic growth, which do you think is more important?” an amazing 62 percent supported “protecting the environment, even if it reduces economic growth” vs. 38 percent who backed “Economic growth, even if it leads to environmental problems.”

More good news: Obama reportedly is going to make climate change a presidential campaign issue. Given that a clear majority of Americans want this country to take strong action to combat human-caused global warming, that's a smart political move.

Obama said:

Part of the challenge over these past three years has been that people’s number-one priority is finding a job and paying the mortgage and dealing with high gas prices. In that environment, it’s been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science. 

I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.

That there’s a way to do it that is entirely compatible with strong economic growth and job creation – that taking steps, for example, to retrofit buildings all across America with existing technologies will reduce our power usage by 15 or 20 percent. That’s an achievable goal, and we should be getting started now.

Get high on Rosenblum to be Oregon A.G., not Holton, fellow Democrats

The more I learn about Dwight Holton, candidate for Oregon Attorney General in the May 15 primary, the less I like him. Ellen Rosenblum seems like a much better choice. 

Holton, during his stint as United States Attorney for Oregon, tried to undermine our state's medical marijuana law.

It irks me how the Obama administration is raiding medical marijuana providers around the country, desperate to take away a drug that relieves chronic pain and helps cancer sufferers feel better.

So why would Oregon want to elect somebody who supports a crazy federal law which equates marijuana with heroin and erroneously claims marijuana has zero medical benefit? The Oregon Attorney General should be focused on serious lawbreaking.

I liked this comment from Anthony Johnson on the Blue Oregon post about Holton's distaste for our medical marijuana law.

If you believe that enforcing minor marijuana laws is a waste of police time, resources and jail space, vote Ellen Rosenblum. If you think that the state of Oregon should focus police resources on more important priorities, like violent crime, vote Ellen Rosenblum.

If you believe that we should be wasting tax dollars and law enforcement resources raiding medical marijuana providers, then vote for Dwight Holton. If you believe that it is okay for sick and disabled medical cannabis patients to lose their medicine in raids and be forced into the underground market, vote Dwight Holton.

If you are a true Democrat, who believes in compassion and efficient prioritizing of our state's resources, there is only one choice for Oregon Attorney General: Ellen Rosenblum.

You nailed it, Anthony. 

For more reasons to cast a vote for Ellen Rosenblum, check out the Not Dwight Holton site. Also, The Weed Blog, which reports on "Cops Break the Law to Help Oregon Politician." 

I hope Dwight Holton realizes that the Oregon medical marijuana community will not stop what we are doing.

We will not stop pointing out the fact that Dwight Holton has received most of his campaign dollars from outside of Oregon. We will not stop pointing out the fact that Dwight Holton wasn’t a member of the Oregon Bar until 2009. We will not stop pointing out that the fact that he has never tried a case in Oregon courts.

With media services like NBC and NPR watching, we will continue to shout at the rooftops. Dwight Holton and his friends at The Oregonian can try to run a smear campaign against us all they want to. We will continue to run our ‘truth campaign.’

In the meantime, expect charges against Oregon law enforcement for their obvious campaign violations. Hopefully people are more upset about it this time around, so they won’t just keep doing it over and over again.

Also on the subject of marijuana...

It bugs me how Oregon football coach Chip Kelly is buying into the "demon weed" propaganda in the course of responding to allegations that 40 to 60 percent of the players on his highly successful team use marijuana. 

Kelly said he doubts the Ducks would be as successful as they have been over the past few years if that many players were smoking marijuana.

“If we had that many kids doing it, we wouldn’t be 34-6 (for the last three seasons),” Kelly said. This past season, the Ducks defeated Wisconsin 45-38 in the Rose Bowl.

“We win because of how hard we practice, and I see our kids every day in practice,” Kelly said. “If we saw signs of it — I haven’t seen signs of it.”

Hey, Chip, I'm an expert in the daily use of marijuana and how this affects mental and physical performance.

[Note to Dwight Holton and other law enforcement officials: I'm referring to my early college years, 1966-68 at San Jose State College.]

I graduated With Great Distinction from college. I got an "A" every semester in a two-year 12 unit Tutorials in Letters and Sciences program that required a lot of high-level independent thinking/writing/discussing through small seminars with demanding professors.

My friends and I regularly would go out and play pool, or frisbee, after smoking marijuana. Our hand-eye coordination wasn't affected at all, so far as I could tell. We'd ride motorcycles around -- no problem. 

I'd much rather be driving around with someone who just smoked a lot of marijuana, than someone who just drank a lot of alcohol.

So Chip, don't worry if your players use marijuana.

I realize you have to sound all parental and critical of marijuana use. But geez, you're coaching at the freakin' University of Oregon in Eugene. You should worry if your players aren't using marijuana, because that'd show they're cut off from reality.

Obama vs. Romney on energy: Obama wins!

There's lots of reasons to vote for President Obama rather than Mitt Romney this November. Lots.

Here's one area where Obama triumphs over Romney, big-time: energy policy. The world is running out of fossil fuels (fossils take a long time to form, so we're using up oil and coal hugely faster than more is being created, but the Republican Party doesn't seem to know this basic fact).

Other countries, like Germany and China, are avidly pursuing profitable alternative energy sources like wind and solar.

Obama recognizes that even though oil and coal will be part of our energy future for many years, the time is now to begin transitioning to sustainable, non-polluting sources of energy which will simultaneously lessen our dependence on foreign oil and stimulate the United States economy.

Romney is stuck in the dark ages, energy policy-wise.

His habitual tilt toward corporate interests ("Corporations are people, my friend!") and the 1% causes him to lean away from American energy independence and home-grown sources of fueling our economy.

Here's a summary of how Obama and Romney differ on energy policy, courtesy of Climate Progress (click to enlarge). For more details, check out "How Obama and Romney Compare on Energy Issues."

What modern women want... spanking and submission?

A blindfolded woman, bright red lipstick, with the title of the Newsweek cover story above her right breast: "The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender is a Feminist Dream."

Looking at the issue I thought, "This is why print magazines are going to survive. Glad I've stuck with our Newsweek subscription after The Daily Beast took it over."

The old Newsweek wouldn't have had such a provocative article. Kudos to the new Newsweek.

Many of the online comments on the story appear to be from feminists who aren't surrendering to the notion that what successful, powerful, confident, independent women want is..

To be spanked into submission. Which, I gather, is a central theme of "Fifty Shades of Grey," the hugely successful novel by E L James (a woman).

Wow. Amazon shows 1,557 customer reviews at the moment, most decidedly positive -- though there are a considerable number of disappointed readers. For various reasons, such as described in this excerpt from the first 1-star review I came across.

~ The writing was too sterile. There was no depth and I found it hard connecting to any of it. There was a whole heap of - I touched him, he touched me, I did this, he did that. And it wasn't engaging at all. When I read I want to be able to feel the emotion, not be told how a scene is playing out as if the heroine is actually an observer.

~ The sex - it wasn't hot at all. I wouldn't even classify it as erotic. For some strange reason I have the opinion that you need to be able to refer to your vagina as something more erotic than 'down there' before you can pull off a significant hotness rating.

~ Christian - ok, he was relatively hot but not enough to get my blood pumping. He wasn't alpha enough for me. One moment he is trying to be hard core the next he is gasping because she is wearing his underwear. Now if that was my dominant alpha, he would have given me a cocky smile, licked his lips and gave that 'how you doin' look, But no, he gasped like a little girl.

~ The price....I don't get it. How can a publisher charge this much for a book written so badly??

The Newsweek story drew me in (so to speak...) in part because I find the whole romance novel thing intriguing.

Whenever I head to the magazine section of the south Salem Fred Meyer store to thumb through car magazines, I walk past several rows of paperback books featuring the romance genre. There's lots of them. 

As Stephen Colbert likes to say, "the market has spoken."

Women buy tons of books featuring a heroine who is swept off her feet by a macho, albeit sensitive, alpha male. Fifty Shades of Grey is #1 on various NY Times bestseller lists, so this also points to what many modern women are looking for in their romantic/sexual fantasies.

The Daily Beast conveniently extracted fourteen of the "naughtiest parts" for those of us, a.k.a. men, who aren't interested in reading all 528 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey. Here's some samples.

“At the touch of leather, I quiver and gasp. He walks around me again, trailing the crop around the middle of my body. On his second circuit, he suddenly flicks the crop, and it hits me underneath my behind … against my sex … The shock runs through me, and it’s the sweetest, strangest, hedonistic feeling … My body convulses at the sweet, stinging bite. My nipples harden and elongate from the assault, and I moan loudly, pulling on my leather cuffs.”

“His arms are wrapped around me, and he’s pulling me to him, hard, fast, gripping my ponytail to tilt my head up, kissing me like his life depends on it … He drags the hair tie painfully out of my hair, but I don’t care. He needs me, for whatever reason, at this point in time, and I have never felt so desired and coveted.” 

I've got to agree with the Amazon reader quoted above; these don't seem very erotic to me. But, hey, I'm not a woman. Whatever turns you on.

That's one of the messages in Katie Roiphe's Newsweek cover story. Human desire/sexuality is amazingly mysterious. There aren't any hard and fast rules (though "hard and fast rules" sounds like something Fifty Shades of Grey has in a sex scene).

Feminism and independence can go hand-in-hand (or hand in something else) with surrender and submission.

It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace, when they make up almost 60 percent of college students, when they are close to surpassing men as breadwinners, with four in 10 working women now outearning their husbands, when the majority of women under 30 are having and supporting children on their own, a moment when—in hard economic terms—women are less dependent or subjugated than before.

...In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire to be published next year. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.”

The researchers and psychologists he talked to for his 2009 New York Timesarticle, “What Do Women Want?” often seemed reluctant to use the phrase “rape fantasy,” and in scholarly pieces, the idea makes even the chroniclers of these fantasies extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said. One of the researchers he interviewed preferred to call them “fantasies of submission”; another said, “It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought.”

But why, for women especially, would free will be a burden? Why is it appealing to think of what happens in the passive tense? Why is it so interesting to surrender, or to play at surrendering? It may be that power is not always that comfortable, even for those of us who grew up in it; it may be that equality is something we want only sometimes and in some places and in some arenas; it may be that power and all of its imperatives can be boring.

Hmmmm. Maybe that's too much analysis.

A woman put up a You Tube review of the book that ends with "I really enjoyed it." Nice and simple.

She helped me understand why Fifty Shades of Grey appeals to so many females. Apparently the young innocent Anastasia Steele helps rich entrepreneur Christian Grey explore his secret, damaged side, bringing out untouched aspects of himself through his passionate relationship with her.

Sounds like Romance Writing 101. Here's the video review:

 

Glaciers are still shrinking from global warming

Almost always, truth runs deeper than a single shallow newspaper story. Especially when the subject is global warming, a subject that has been studied in depth by climate scientists.

This morning Google News led me to a Christian Science Monitor story, "Global warming mystery: some Himalayan glaciers getting bigger." Yes, but only some. And not a lot bigger.

Then I came across another more inclusive story in the Guardian by Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre, "The glaciers are still shrinking -- and rapidly." 

With glaciers and ice sheets covering such a diverse range of latitudes (from the tropics to the poles) and altitudes (from sea level to over 6,000 metres), it is not surprising that there are regional variations in their behaviour. Such variability should not, however, distract from the broader and more important story unfolding, which is one of profound and likely irreversible changes to global land and sea ice cover. Taken as a whole, the evidence for sustained changes to the cryosphere is clear.

The impacts these changes are having on water resources, sea-level rise and climate feedbacks are already observable and significant. Some recent predictions of the increase in sea levels by 2100 exceed one metre. Loss of Arctic sea ice results in enhanced warming of the Arctic Ocean due to a strong positive feedback.

Most glaciologists believe we are witnessing unprecedented changes to land and sea ice. The burning question is not if, but how fast, land and sea ice will disappear, and what we can do to mitigate and adapt to these changes.

That's the deeper truth. Global warming is real. It's happening. And we've got to mitigate and adapt to it.

Why conservative Supreme Court justices are wrong about the mandate

My respect for the four most conservative Supreme Court justices has gone down a lot this past week, now that I've been able to learn how their supposedly top-notch legal minds view the Affordable Care Act's mandate that every American have health insurance.

A cartoon by Politico's Matt Wuerker sums up the absurdity of how Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito seem to be viewing the mandate issue.

Columnist (and economist) Paul Krugman made pretty much the same point as cartoonist Wuerker in his column, "Broccoli and Bad Faith."

Let’s start with the already famous exchange in which Justice Antonin Scalia compared the purchase of health insurance to the purchase of broccoli, with the implication that if the government can compel you to do the former, it can also compel you to do the latter. That comparison horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli.

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate — the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has.

There are at least two ways to address this reality — which is, by the way, very much an issue involving interstate commerce, and hence a valid federal concern. One is to tax everyone — healthy and sick alike — and use the money raised to provide health coverage. That’s what Medicare and Medicaid do. The other is to require that everyone buy insurance, while aiding those for whom this is a financial hardship.

Are these fundamentally different approaches? Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage O.K., while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional? It’s hard to see why — and it’s not just those of us without legal training who find the distinction strange. Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick looks at the bizarre anti-morality of Scalia, and, likely, other conservative justices who agree with him, in her thoughtful piece, "The Supreme Court's Dark Vision of Freedom."

When Solicitor General Donald Verrilli tries to explain to Justice Scalia that the health care market is unique because “getting health care service … [is] a result of the social norms to which we've obligated ourselves so that people get health care.” Scalia’s response is a curt: “Well, don't obligate yourself to that.”

...Freedom is the freedom not to join a gym, not to be forced to eat broccoli. It’s the freedom not to be compelled to buy wheat or milk. And it’s the freedom to purchase your health insurance only at the “point of consumption”—i.e., when you’re being medivaced to the ICU (assuming you have the cash).

...Sotomayor, again pondering whether hospitals could simply turn away the uninsured, finally asks: “What percentage of the American people who took their son or daughter to an emergency room and that child was turned away because the parent didn't have insurance—do you think there's a large percentage of the American population who would stand for the death of that child if they had an allergic reaction and a simple shot would have saved the child?”

But we seem to want to be free from that obligation as well. This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old.

Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.” This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone.

And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

E.J. Dionne expressed exactly how I felt about the tone of debate among the conservative Supreme Court justices. What the hell were the justices doing, with all their talk about whether Congress could, or should, deal with the consequences of a court decision that the individual mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional? 

Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health-care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Senator, excuse me, Justice Samuel Alito quoted Congressional Budget Office figures on Tuesday to talk about the insurance costs of the young. On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts sounded like the House whip in discussing whether parts of the law could stand if other parts fell. He noted that without various provisions, Congress “wouldn’t have been able to put together, cobble together, the votes to get it through.” Tell me again, was this a courtroom or a lobbyist’s office?

It fell to the court’s liberals — the so-called “judicial activists,” remember? — to remind their conservative brethren that legislative power is supposed to rest in our government’s elected branches.

Justice Stephen Breyer noted that some of the issues raised by opponents of the law were about “the merits of the bill,” a proper concern of Congress, not the courts. And in arguing for restraint, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what was wrong with leaving as much discretion as possible “in the hands of the people who should be fixing this, not us.” It was nice to be reminded that we’re a democracy, not a judicial dictatorship.

The current membership of the Supreme Court arguably is the most conservative in modern history. OK. It is what it is. But we can still expect that the conservative judges will act like judges, not legislators, politicians, or lobbyists. 

Greg Sargent asks, "How did legal observers and Obamacare backers get it so wrong?" His answer: because they over-optimistically believed that conservative Supreme Court judges like Scalia wouldn't allow their personal political beliefs to overwhelm their legal analysis.

I didn’t mention this yesterday, but in his interview with me about the limiting principle, former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried was scaldingly critical of the willingness of the conservative bloc of Supreme Court justices to traffic in some of the most well-worn Tea Party tropes about Obamacare.

“I was appalled to see that at least a couple of them were repeating the most tendentious of the Tea Party type arguments,” Fried said. “I even heard about broccoli. The whole broccoli argument is beneath contempt. To hear it come from the bench was depressing.”

Which raises a question: How did so many commentators predicting this would be a slam dunk for the Obama administration get it so wrong?

...During oral arguments this week, Scalia invoked the broccoli argument to question the goverment’s case. He mocked the government’s position with a reference to the “cornhusker kickback,” even though that’s not in the law. As Fried notes, this language is straight out of the Tea Party guerrilla manual that was written during the battle to prevent Obamacare from becoming law in the first place.

All of which is to say that the law's proponents were badly caught off guard by the depth of the conservative bloc’s apparent hostility towards the law and its willingness to embrace the hard right’s arguments against its constitutionality. They didn’t anticipate that this could shape up as an ideological death struggle over the heart and soul of the Obama presidency, which, as E.J. Dionne notes today, is exactly what it has become.

Fox News gets positive about Chevy Volt

It must have been my recent blog post that convinced Fox News it should stop lying about the Chevy Volt and get behind an all-American car that has won both the North American and European Car of the Year awards.

Because this Steve Doocy interview strikes a whole different tone from the Volt-bashing that's been going on at Fox News.

Oil-loving conservative Texan Lee Spieckerman of Spieckerman Media started off by saying that Fox News commentators have had "a fetish for demonizing the Volt," then went on to explain why the Volt is such a great car.

I love Fox news, and I feel like I’m kind of attacking my own family here. I love O’Reilly, I love Neil Cavuto, I love Eric Bolling, but like a lot of my fellow conservatives, they seem to have kind of a fetish for demonizing the Volt.

They are perpetuating the myth that the Volt was some kind of Obama administration green energy fantasy that as you say was forced on General Motors during the bailout.

It’d been in development two years before Obama was elected. And it was championed by … Bob Lutz, who is a conservative and a climate change skeptic. So you know it’s a myth.

The tax break for buying the Volt was implemented by the Bush administration. It was not  something that was implemented under the Obama administration.

So unfortunately, there have been a lot of myths perpetuated.

Have a look. 

My favorite part is when Spieckerman asks Doocy if he knows how electricity is generated in Ohio. I thought, "Oh, no! They're going to criticize the Volt for using electricity from global-warming exacerbating fossil fuel."

Not so surprisingly though, both Spieckerman and Doocy loved how the Volt and other electric cars are able to use coal for "fuel." American coal! USA, USA, USA! Driving an electric car is the height of patriotism, according to Spieckerman.

On the personal front, my wife and I ordered a Volt today from Capitol Chevrolet here in Salem. We're going to sell our Nissan Leaf and shift to the Volt's approach to going electric. The Leaf also is a great car, but it ended up not being as suitable for our lifestyle as we expect the Volt will be.

Sneak preview of the Auto Trader ad I'm putting up tomorrow: Our price for a 2011 Nissan Leaf with only 3,000 miles will be the least expensive used Leaf being sold in the entire United States. (I'm pretty sure of that; need to double-check prices tomorrow.)

Plus, our 2011 Leaf has leather seats and a Level 3 (fastest) charger. If you're looking for a Leaf, and want to pay a lot less than the $37,250 MSRP for a new 2012 Leaf, look no further. We've got a great all-electric car for you, at a great price.

Reality doesn't register in the Republican brain

Yesterday Amazon delivered Chris Mooney's new book, "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality." 

I've only read a few pages so far, but I can tell that I'm going to like it. And not just because Mooney agrees with how I see the two major political parties, Republicans being way more reality-denying than Democrats. 

I want to understand why Republican science-deniers do what they do. Like all human behavior, they really can't help themselves. Something in their brains causes them to look upon facts in decidedly unfactual ways. 

Us liberals will be ineffective in changing conservative minds if we don't grasp how the Republican brain distorts reality. In his introduction, Mooney promises that he'll give advice along this line.

Here's some right-on quotes from what I read last night.

What's more, no matter how much the fact-checkers strive to remain "bipartisan," it is pretty hard to argue that the distribution of falsehoods today is politically equal or symmetrical. It's not that liberals are never wrong or biased; a number of liberal errors will be described and debunked in these pages. 

Nevertheless -- and as I will show -- politicized wrongness today is clustered among Republicans, conservatives, and especially Tea Partiers.

...The cost of this assault on reality is dramatic. Many of these falsehoods affect lives and have had -- or will have -- world-changing consequences. And more dangerous than any of them is the erosion of a shared sense of what's true -- which they both generate, and perpetuate.

...Science. This is the area I care about most deeply, and the denial here is particularly intense. In a nationally representative survey released just as I was finishing this book -- many prior surveys have found similar things -- only 18 percent of Republicans and Tea Party members accepted the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by humans, and only 45 and 43 percent (respectively) accepted human evolution.

In other words, political conservatives have placed themselves in direct conflict with modern scientific knowledge, which shows beyond serious question that global warming is real and caused by humans, and evolution is real and the cause of humans. If you don't accept either claim, you cannot possibly understand the world or our place in it.

The evidence suggests that many conservatives today just don't.

U.S. justice system locks up way too many people

In some areas the United States may truly be exceptional. But our health care and criminal justice systems suck, big time. We should learn from other countries who do a much better job keeping their citizens healthy and safe.

In health care, we spend twice as much as other industrialized nations, yet our health status indicators are below average and forty or fifty million Americans are uninsured. Crazy.

The Affordable Care Act is a step in the right direction. A single payer health care system, a.k.a. Medicare for All, would be a leap in the right direction.

Our criminal justice system doesn't get as much media and political air time, but it should. Fareed Zakaria helps bring our attention to our equally crazy incarceration rate in his column in this week's TIME magazine, "Incarceration Nation."

Here's some excerpts which point out that the United States prison system has way too many people locked up, and some reasons why this is.

"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today," writes the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik. "Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America--more than 6 million--than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That's not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain--with a rate among the highest--has 153.

Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV show, The 700 Club, "We here in America make up 5% of the world's population but we make up 25% of the [world's] jailed prisoners."

...This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.'s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.

That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America's federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession.

...Bipartisan forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the 1990s to a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying mandatory sentences for time in state or federal prison.

And as always in American politics, there is the money trail. Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals. These firms can create jobs in places where steady work is rare; in many states, they have also helped create a conveyor belt of cash for prisons from treasuries to outlying counties.

"Stand Your Ground" laws are absurdly dangerous

The more I read about the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17 year old, by a neighborhood watch volunteer who followed the black boy around his neighborhood, looking for an excuse to play policeman even though he was told by a 911 responder to stay put in his car, the more absurdly dangerous "Stand Your Ground" laws look to me.

And many others. Like a former Miami police chief. 

Police officers are trained to de-escalate highly charged encounters with aggressive people, using deadly force as a last resort. Citizens, on the other hand, may act from emotion and perceived threats. But “stand your ground” gives citizens the right to use force in public if they feel threatened. As the law emphatically states, a citizen has “no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground.”

...As Florida police chiefs predicted in 2005, the law has been used to justify killings ranging from drug dealers’ turf battles to road rage incidents. Homicides categorized as justifiable have nearly tripled since the law went into effect.

...Gov. Rick Scott of Florida can make all Floridians proud by being the first governor to reject and repeal such misguided laws.

Like a former police reporter who wrote a terrific piece on this subject, "Welcome to Florida. Beware of gunmen standing their ground."

It’s no wonder that professional law enforcement officials oppose these new laws. They are, at best, a license for any fool with a firearm to shoot anyone he decides to fear, and at worst, an invitation to murder.

Conservatives often argue that personal responsibility is the doctrine by which America will heal itself, and yet “Stand Your Ground” offers exactly the opposite. Rather than holding people accountable for taking human life and keeping the burden of proof on those citizens who choose to kill, the new standard requires society to prove that the taking of human life wasn’t necessary.

Like a talented cartoonist who said it all in eight comic, but not-funny, images.

Last month I blogged, "Best self defense technique: run away!" The Treyvor Martin killing/murder/manslaughter (almost surely, not self-defense) speaks loudly in favor of what I said. 

If Stand Your Ground laws can't be repealed, as they should, at least they should be amended to require that before someone who feels threatened stands his/her ground, he or she has a duty to do everything possible to escape from the situation.

Walk or run away. Look for help. Head in the other direction. Whatever.

Nobody should have a right to kill another human being and call it self-defense when there were other options open to them. Nobody. Never. Ever.

Crazy March weather points to global warming

This morning my wife and I had to cope with five inches of snow on the ground here in rural south Salem (Oregon). It was weird. I've lived in Oregon for forty-one years. Can't remember a time when the blooming daffodils were crushed by so much snow.

Because our newspapers couldn't be delivered, over breakfast I read a story about the spring storm in the Oregonian online. Turning to the comments, I saw predictable comments along the lines of "Ha, ha, Al Gore is wrong. Can't be global warming if the Willamette Valley got record-breaking snow for this time of year."

That sort of ignorance isn't bliss. It's disturbing. Because if lots of Americans keep on denying the reality of global warming, we're headed for much scarier and much weirder weather.

The global warming deniers who used comments on the Oregonian story to display their foolishness forgot, or ignored, an inconvenient truth: while the temperature in the Pacific Northwest has been unusally cool this month, most of the rest of the United States has been extremely warm.

On the highly recommended Climate Progress blog, check out March Madness: 'This May Be an Unprecedented Event Since Modern U.S. Weather Records Began in the Late 19th Century.' The post starts out this way.

Dr. Jeff Masters: A spring heat wave like no other in U.S. and Canadian history peaked in intensity yesterday, during its tenth day. Since record keeping began in the late 1800s, there have never been so many temperature records broken for spring warmth in a one-week period–and the margins by which some of the records were broken yesterday were truly astonishing. Wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, commented to me yesterday, “it’s almost like science fiction at this point.“

Yesterday, meteorologist Masters published a detailed statistical analysis that concluded, “It is highly unlikely the warmth of the current ‘Summer in March’ heat wave could have occurred unless the climate was warming.”

See that strip of blue on the northern portion of the Pacific coast? In addition to south Texas, that's the only spot in the United States that has been unseasonably cool from March 8-15, 2012.

All that red, including the really dark red? That's record-breaking heat. 

Global warming is real. We need to deal with it. Now.

Chevy Volt -- Rich Lowry is wrong about a great car

My wife and I are seriously considering selling our Nissan Leaf and getting a Chevy Volt. We've got good reasons for doing so, but that's the subject of another post.

What I want to talk about now is the trashing of the Volt by conservatives such as Rich Lowry, who wrote an absurd column, "The Sad Plight of Obama's Edsel," that ran in the Portland Oregonian yesterday.

There's so much wrong with Lowry's piece, it's tough to know where to start with truth-telling. I guess the title is a good place. The Volt isn't Obama's car. General Motors revealed the concept car version in January 2007, and unveiled the production model in September 2008.

President Obama took office in January 2009. So Lowry is way off-base when he calls it "Obama's Edsel." It isn't Obama's car. And it is nothing like the ill-fated Edsel.

Lowry says the Volt is "government approved." Well, no more so than any other car. There are safety and other standards for cars. That must be what Lowry is talking about in his snarky attempt to disparage a car that has won both the North American and European Car of the Year awards.

He misleadingly says that the Volt gets 35 mpg on gas (a generator kicks in to run the electric motors after the Volt's battery is depleted, which is good for about 40 miles). Lowry ignores the "infinite" mpg mileage on battery power.

I've read lots of reports from happy Volt owners on various forums. Frequently they go months without buying gasoline, because their daily drive is less than 40 miles. Even with occasional use of the gas generator, it's possible to enjoy hundreds of miles per gallon with the Volt.

The official EPA figure is 93 MPG Equivalent using the battery only (cost of electricity is equated to cost of gasoline; here in the northwest, electricity costs less than average, so the MPG Equivalent is higher). Consumer Reports (April 2012 auto issue) shows the Volt as getting the best overall fuel economy, 61 mpg, of any car -- except the all-electric Nissan Leaf, which gets 106 mpg.

So Lowry is wrong when he says the Volt's mileage is "comparable to the Cruze." Consumer Reports says the Chevy Cruze gets 26 mpg, less than half of the Volt's mileage.

Lowry disparages the cost of the Volt, about $40,000. Even though he and his fellow Republicans endorse subsidies for oil companies and other fossil fuel enterprises, offering tax credits for purchase of an electric car bothers him.

Here in Oregon, a Volt buyer can qualify for a $7,500 federal and $1,500 state tax credit. That brings the price down to about $31,000. While browsing a Volt forum I came across a "Volt Cost Comparison with Average US Car Ownership" spreadsheet.

Pretty interesting. Shows that the Volt is cheaper than the average car over a six-year ownership period, even without the federal tax credit.

Like I said before, Fox News and other right-wingers have been lying about the Volt. Now Rich Lowry has joined the Untruth Squad. I enjoyed this letter to the editor in the Oregonian, written in response to Lowry's column.

Thank you for publishing Rich Lowry's hilarious anti-American car infomercial ("Obama's Edsel: Electric car has a grim future if it's the Chevy Volt," March 21). His portrayal of Americans as feeble oafs unable to plug in their cars cracked me up.

Imagine a hand-wringing actor: "How does this crazy electricity work?! Too complicated, I give up. I need the convenience of waiting in line to pump an expensive, highly flammable liquid carcinogen that we fight wars to get! Boy, oil companies need even more subsidies!" 

Lowry has gotten the conservative memo to attack American innovation and the successful (bipartisan) rescue of the auto industry since 2008. Heaven forbid we think that keeping nearly a million Americans in good jobs creating award-winning vehicles is a good thing. 

My father-in-law's Volt is getting over 199 mpg; he tops off at home. 

PETER NOORDIJK 
North Portland  

Right on, Peter. Nice letter.

Pared down HB 4095 won't harm Oregon land use system

I'm feeling better about what I called "land use shenanigans" that popped up at the very end of the Oregon legislature's short 2012 session.

After learning more about what the $550,000 appropriated by the joint Ways and Means Committee for a pilot regional land use planning project in Josephine, Jackson, and Douglas counties would do, it looks like Oregon's efforts to protect irreplaceable farm and forest land from unnecessary development aren't much at risk.

This is because HB 4095, which was a major threat to Oregon's land use system, died without getting a vote in either the House or Senate. 1000 Friends of Oregon noted that HB 4095 was called a "major threat" by the Oregon Conservation Network. 

What the bill proposes: HB 4095 would allow the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) to redefine agricultural and forest lands in three Southern Oregon counties based in part on factors other than the productivity of the soil or the history of resource use. The bill then allows the counties to redesignate current agricultural and forest lands as "non-resource", paving the way for development.  The bill includes such factors as speculation about the future viability of resource use and proximity to other land uses.

Why 1000 Friends opposes this bill: HB 4095 could allow sprawling rural residential development on lands that have been in continuous farm or forest use for generations. 

...The bill would also add unnecessary complexity to the land use program. If Southern Oregon counties require a new definition of agricultural and forest lands specifically reflecting the usability of such lands for resource uses, current law provides the means to do so. Also, re-mapping of lands that do not meet the definition of agricultural land or forest land is already possible under HB 2229, passed by the Legislature in 2009. However, no county has taken advantage of that authorization. This bill is not only bad policy, it is simply unnecessary.

So if HB 4095 was unnecessary and didn't even get a hearing in the joint Ways and Means Committee, why was $550,000 in general fund taxpayer money allocated by that committee to enable three Oregon counties to do what already can be done under existing laws and regulations?

Apparently because lots of legislative "horse-trading" goes on at the end of a session. Republicans were stymied on some of their favorite bills and wanted to be able to point to some wins, no matter how small, in exchange for supporting Democratic legislative priorities.

Also, many people view Oregon's land use system as being too rigid.

So giving the three southern Oregon counties some money to support an attempt to come up with regional definitions of farm and forest land throws a bone to the barking dogs who would prefer to see land use planning go away completely.

It looks like nothing substantive will be done with the $550,000 until the next biennium, which begins on July 1, 2013.

The state Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) will have to come up with rules to guide the activities of the three counties. Then any request to redefine what is productive farm and forest land in southern Oregon would need to be approved by the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC).

Since all state land use laws remain intact, and no new legal criteria for defining farm/forest land were added because of the failure to pass HB 4095, if the three counties succeed in getting LCDC to agree to some proposal, it will be no different from what could have been done prior to the 2012 legislative session.

In the end, then, Republican members of the legislature will be able to claim a small victory for local control over land use decisions, even though actually Jackson, Josephine, and Douglas counties don't have any more control now than they did before.

They just have $550,000 to do what they could always have done: petition DLCD and LCDC to define farm and forest lands differently based on the usability of these lands in a regional area. LIke I said before, to me it seems like that money would have been better spent on other needs -- such as education, health care, or public safety.

But since the bad aspects of HB 4095 were pruned away by the Ways and Means Committee, what's left is almost certainly innocuous.

Land use system-hating county commissioners in the three southern Oregon counties will huff and puff about the need to pave over farm and forest land so that illusory jobs can be created. In the end, whatever definitional changes allowed to take place will be what is already permitted under state land use laws.

We are the 1%! (heart-health wise)

My wife and I have proudly marched in Occupy Salem events, chanting "We are the 99%!" But we're pleased to learn that we're also in the 1% -- the percentage of Americans who met all seven metrics of cardiovascular health.

Which are:

• Not smoking
• Physical activity (being active)
• Having blood pressure under control
• Maintaining healthy blood glucose levels
• Maintaining healthy blood cholesterol levels
• Maintaining a healthy body weight
• Following a healthy and balanced diet

I barely made it past the body weight criterion, finding that my six feet tall'ness and 182 pounds of weight'ness gave me a BMI (body mass index) of 24.7, just a bit under the 25 that qualified me for normal weight.

Otherwise, though, I'm clearly in the Healthy Zone on the other six criteria. And it really isn't all that difficult to do. 

Yet only 1.2% of Americans met all seven metrics during 2005-2010, compared to an also-measly, but somewhat better, 2% from 1988 to 1994.

Conclusion: Americans are in bad shape.

That's obvious from watching my fellow citizens gorge themselves on crappy food, and try to cram their fat butts into airplane seats that are plenty wide for normal bodies -- but not the abnormally obese American physique.

Health insurance plans and employers are catching on to how much medical care money goes to pay for conditions that could have been prevented if people had healthier lifestyles. Good news.

If people's insurance premiums were partly based on how many of the seven heart-healthy metrics insurees met, that'd be a monetary incentive to engage in healthier behaviors. 

Fox News and Krauthammer lie about Chevy Volt safety

We own an electric car, a Nissan Leaf. So while I'm irritated when right-wingers lie about anything, it particularly bugs me when untruths are spread about alternative energy cars -- including the Chevy Volt. 

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer joined the Volt lie parade in his "Obama's Oil Flimflam." In yesterday's Portland Oregonian, I read:

Instead, Obama offers what he fancies to be the fuels of the future. You would think that he’d be a tad more modest today about his powers of divination after the Solyndra bankruptcy, the collapse of government-subsidized Ener1 (past makers of the batteries of the future) and GM’s suspension of production — for lack of demand — of another federally dictated confection, the flammable Chevy Volt.

Naturally a print newspaper doesn't have a clickable link.

But when I located Krauthammer's column on the Washington Post web site, I was curious to see where the Chevy Volt link in the paragraph above led me, because I knew that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had exonerated the Volt.

NHTSA remains unaware of any real-world crashes that have resulted in a battery-related fire involving the Chevy Volt or any other electric vehicle... Based on the available data, NHTSA does not believe that Chevy Volts or other electric vehicles pose a greater risk of fire than gasoline-powered vehicles.

lndeed, the web link in Krauthammer's column didn't lead to proof of the Chevy Volt's flammability, but to a story which said the opposite.

GM executives have said the recent frenzy over a Volt battery fire in crash tests has hurt sales. On the merits, the fires weren’t a huge concern — the Volts only caught fire days or weeks after extreme lab testing, and according to a government investigation they’re no more likely to catch fire than gas-powered automobiles. Still, panicky headlines ensued. Conservatives started denouncing the company (Rush Limbaugh called GM “a corporation that’s trying to kill its customers”).

Fox News and other conservative mouthpieces hate General Motors because it is one of Obama's big success stories. The auto industry bailout worked, saving many thousands of jobs. They also hate electric cars, because the oil industry is a big contributor to Republican causes, and alternative energy is one way to deal with global warming -- a reality that most conservatives deny.

So Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Tea Party types have been spreading lies about the Chevy Volt, as ably documented by Media Matters. 

Disgusting. As was Charles Krauthammer's piling on with his "flammable" remark. I've sent the Oregonian a letter to the editor and also emailed it to Krauthammer:

I just sent a letter to the editor off to the Portland Oregonian. You should check your facts before repeating untruths in your column. It damages your credibility on other issues where you express a legitimate opinion. It took me about ten seconds to find the NHTSA report on the Volt. Couldn't you have done the same?

http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2012/NHTSA+Statement+on+Conclusion+of+Chevy+Volt+Investigation

Here's my letter to the editor:

"In a recent column, Charles Krauthammer repeated the Fox News myth that owners of GM's electric vehicle should fear car fires, referring to "the flammable Chevy Volt." The National Highway Traffic Safety Commission (NHTSC) says it is unaware of any real-world crashes resulting in a battery-related fire involving the Volt or any other electric vehicle.

But many times I've watched the evening news and seen footage of a gasoline powered car bursting into flames. The NHTSC concluded that electric cars aren't more prone to fires than conventional cars. Krauthammer needs to check his facts before repeating untruths spread by haters of the auto industry bailout and alternatives to fossil fuels."

Things a conservative mistakenly thinks liberals believe

It gives me great satisfaction to correct conservatives, who, as I said in a previous post, are more fact-challenged than liberals.

Someone left a comment on that post, after I noted that Pete Dominick had asked on his radio show: What's the weird unfactual stuff many liberals believe that is equivalent to conservative lunacies like Obama being a Muslim?

He offered up ten supposed answers to the question he phrased as, "What's the weird unfactual stuff many liberals believe?" I'm pleased to correct him on each.

1. that killing coyotes means more coyotes

(1) Yes, I said this in a blog post, and I'm a liberal. I supplied evidence to support this assertion, quoting from a "Living With Coyotes" factsheet distributed by the city of Tigard here in Oregon: For these reasons, eradication efforts frequently lead to increases in local coyote populations.

And coyote expert Robert Crabtree says: The common practice of reducing adult coyote populations on western rangelands is most likely ineffective and may even increase the number of lambs, fawns, and calves killed by coyotes. So killing coyotes often does mean more coyotes, as well as more livestock deaths.

2.that science proves man made global warming (because the facts do not back it up they send emails back and forth ploting to fake the data)

(2) This one is easy. Ninety-seven percent, 97%!!!, of climate experts consider that human-caused global warming is happening. Anyone who believes otherwise refuses to face the scientific facts.

3.that republicans are more racist and sexist than dems (while there are people that did not vote for obama because of race, there are many many more that did vote for him just for that reason alone. Most who did not and do not want him as POTUS came to that conclusion because of his failed policies)

(3) I don't know any liberals who call Republicans "racist" or "sexist." But I'm sure they exist. Question is, can that conclusion be justified by Republican actions? Not directly. However, the contraception and abortion debates show that Republicans don't believe women are capable of making decisions by themselves. Doonesbury nailed this in recent comic strips.

4.that the constitution of the USA has the words "seperation of church and state" anywhere in it

(4) I don't hear liberals claiming this. However, the First Amendment definitely implies that church and state are to be separated.

5. that it is ok to call women twat's and discuss what they would like to do female canidates it the bedroom just because they do not agree with them

(5) Many liberals believe this? Show me some evidence. Back up your assertion with facts. We're talking "many," not just a few people. Or a single person.

6.that radical terrorists can be negotiated with

(6) Poll, please? Where's the evidence that many or most liberals believe this? Obama was the president who oversaw the killing of Bin Laden, not Bush. Obama has killed more terrorist leaders than our previous Republican president did: In the process, the White House said, it has killed more officials of Al Qaeda in the last two and a half years than were eliminated during the entire Bush administration. 

7.that guns kill people(best bumper sticker ever "guns kill people like a spoon made rosie odonell fat"

(7) In England and Wales, where gun ownership is severely limited, 8% of homicides are committed with firearms. In the United States, with a very high rate of gun ownership, 65% of homicides are committed with firearms. So, yes, guns kill people. 

8.that people in this country illegally should be able to get public services, licenses, and vote in our elections

(8) This isn't a factual/unfactual assertion. I agree that more liberals than conservatives believe that undocumented immigrants to this country should be able to get public services, like health care. Also, that it is better to have them pass a driver's test, than to drive without a license. I've never heard of liberals saying that non-citizens should be able to vote.  

9.that vetting a presidential candidate is great unless that canidate is a dem. then we should just believe whatever he or she says

(9) This also isn't a factual/unfactual asertion. I'll point out, though, that Obama was scrutinized extremely closely in the 2008 election. Everything about him was brought out into the open and discussed in excruciating detail. 

10.that saying USA USA USA in USA is racist

(10) I have no idea where you get the idea that liberals believe this. Me, I consider that chanting "USA, USA, USA!" is stupid, unless, maybe, it's done at the Olympics. But even then, I'd say it's stupid. Regardless, stupid isn't racist.

Conservatives are more fact-challenged than liberals

Yesterday I heard POTUS's Pete Dominick ask his satellite radio listeners an interesting question: What's the weird unfactual stuff many liberals believe that is equivalent to conservative lunacies like Obama being a Muslim?

Dominick observed that a majority of Republican voters in Mississippi think President Obama is Muslim rather than Christian. That's crazy! 

So he asked conservatives to call in and give him examples of what lots of liberals/progressives believe that is similarly wildly unfactual. I listened for quite a while as I was driving around. The answer: nothing.

A few people cited "Bush was responsible for the 9/11 attacks." But Dominick correctly pointed out that this isn't a widespread liberal belief. I've never heard progressives at a campaign rally yell this out, like Tea Party types do with Obama is a Muslim!

Yes, there are people with crazy ideas on both sides of the political spectrum.

Yet I can't think of any reality-denying fantasy on the left that is anywhere near as fact-challenged, and as widely held, as the conservative denial of human-caused global warming. Or the cries about Affordable Care Act "death panels."

My wife and I never get bizarre emails filled with wacko lies about Republican politicians or conservative policies. Regularly, though, people forward us emails that are flying around cyberspace which contain blatant untruths about Obama and Democratic initiatives.

A large part of the reason for this seems to be the influence of Fox News on conservative brains. On a recent Point of Inquiry podcast, I heard Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters executive vice-president, talk about his book, "The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network Into a Propaganda Machine."

Have a listen. Here's how Point of Inquiry summarized the interview.

If there's one thing Point of Inquiry is concerned about, it's ensuring a rational, sensible conversation in politics, in public life. And you simply can't have such a conversation if the culture is awash in political, and politicized, misinformation.

What do we mean by "misinformation"? The denial of global warming. Claims about "death panels." Assertions that the President of the United States wasn't actually born here.

One thing all these falsehoods have in common is that if you watch Fox News, you're more likely to believe them. Fox increases your risk, so to speak, of believing factually wrong things to support a political agenda. With other networks, this "Fox effect" just isn't there.

How did it get this way? How did one leading network become a fount of misinformation?

For that, we turn to the most dedicated Fox monitors of them all—Media Matters. They've got a new book out on Fox, and I've invited their Executive Vice President, Ari Rabin-Havt, on to talk about it.

Yes, watching Fox News is dangerous to your knowledge of reality. People who don't watch TV news at all are better informed about political issues than those who watch Fox.

Oregonian editorial page editor dies in illicit sexy fashion

Death isn't a joking matter. Still, I can't resist saying "Way to go, Bob Caldwell." 

The Oregonian newspaper reported Monday that Bob Caldwell, the long-time editor of the editorial pages, died in the apartment of a 23-year-old woman after going into cardiac arrest following a sex act.

The paper had previously reported that Caldwell was found in his parked car.

The paper now says the woman was the one who called 9-1-1 on Saturday to report that Caldwell was unresponsive.

According to the correction published in The Oregonian, the woman told deputies she met Caldwell a year ago at Portland Community College and he provided cash for books and other school expenses, in exchange for sex. According to deputies quoted by the paper, no money was exchanged Saturday and therefore no prostitution charges would be filed. 

Caldwell joined The Oregonian as a copy editor in 1983. Before taking his post at the head of the editorial section, he worked as a regional, metro and public editor for The Oregonian. He led the paper's editorial board since November 1995.

Caldwell, who was 63 years old, is survived by his wife and three daughters.

As a fellow 63 year old, I'd like to know what the sex act was. And is it now going to be banned by Obama as part of his preventive medicine efforts under the Affordable Care Act? 

Sam Harris' "Free Will" says liberals understand role of luck

It's pleasing to my progressive self when modern science confirms one of the foundations of Democratic/liberal political philosophy. Such as, that we humans don't have free will. It's an illusion.

Such is the message of Sam Harris' captivating new book, the pleasingly short (66 readable pages) "Free Will." Harris is a neuroscientist whose first book was "The End of Faith," which brought him a lot of well-deserved attention. 

I hope "Free Will" reaches even more people. On my other blog I've talked about the dizzying joy of being freed from a belief in free will, and how free will is a limiting, destructive belief.

Harris talks about the political aspects of free will in a next-to-last Politics chapter.

What he says is highly relevant to our nation's current debates over whether the goal of government should be to let people alone to pursue their own supposedly freely chosen routes to success and happiness, or whether efforts aimed at leveling out the "bad luck" playing field are justified.

Science comes down solidly on the second option. No man or woman is an island. Our successes and failures, our joys and sorrows, are all tightly tied to other people, genetic influences, culture, education, and many other kinds of social experiences.

Here's the entire three page chapter:

For better or worse, dispelling the illusion of free will has political implications -- because liberals and conservatives are not equally in thrall to it. Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.

Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.

Consider the biography of any "self-made" man, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make and of which he was merely the beneficiary. 

There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren't born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments.

Even if you have struggled to make the most of what nature gave you, you must still admit that your ability and inclination to struggle is part of your inheritance. How much credit does a person deserve for not being lazy? None at all. Laziness, like diligence, is a neurological condition.

Of course, conservatives are right to think that we must encourage people to work to the best of their abilities and discourage free riders wherever we can. And it is wise to hold people responsible for their actions when doing so influences their behavior and brings benefit to society. 

But this does not mean that we must be taken in by the illusion of free will. We need only acknowledge that efforts matter and that people can change. We do not change ourselves, precisely -- because we only have ourselves with which to do the changing -- but we continually influence, and are influenced by, the world around us and the world within us.

It may seem paradoxical to hold people responsible for what happens in their corner of the universe, but once we break the spell of free will, we can do this precisely to the degree that it is useful.

Where people can change, we can demand that they do so. Where change is impossible, or unresponsive to demands, we can chart some other course. In improving ourselves and society, we are working directly with the forces of nature, for there is nothing but nature itself to work with.

Sneaky land use shenanigans in 2012 Oregon legislature

I don't think I've ever used "shenanigan" in a blog post, but I'm bringing out that word to describe what happened to HB 4095 at the end of the 2012 Oregon legislative session.

a devious trick used especially for an underhand purpose

tricky or questionable practices or conduct 

Yeah, that's what "passing" a bill through hidden backroom budgetary machinations rather than in an open deliberative legislative vote is -- a shenanigan. 

HB 4095 was an attempt to begin dismantling Oregon's successful land use system by allowing counties to band together and come up with regional definitions of farm and forest land which permitted "pave it over" development.

1000 Friends of Oregon called it "the session's biggest land use threat." I testified against it. At the hearing I attended, the Oregon Association of Realtors was for the bill. Almost everyone else who appeared before the House Judiciary committee was against it, including farmers.

There was absolutely zero reason for HB 4095.

Regional definitions of farm and forest land already are allowed. If resource lands, farm or forest, have been misidentified under a definition, this can be fixed via remapping under a bill passed in a previous legislative session (HB 2229). 

So given how little support HB 4095 had, and how there was no need for it, I was feeling good when I kept checking the Oregonian's bill tracker and finding it hadn't gotten any votes after passing out of the Judiciary committee on a near party-line vote.

(Modern day Republicans hate land use planning, even though G.O.P. Governor Tom McCall presided over the founding of Oregon's land use system in the early 1970s.)

In fact, HB 4095 didn't get a vote before the session ended. Yet much of the bill "passed" anyway. How? Through shenanigans, a.k.a. back room dealmaking.

I don't know how it happened -- I wasn't invited into the back room -- but a Ways and Means committee item in the budget rebalance bill, SB 5701, inserted at almost the last minute gave proponents of HB 4095 much of what they wanted, and couldn't get through public hearings, deliberative debate, and transparent voting by elected citizen representatives.

To support an anticipated Governor’s directive to pilot a regional land use planning project, $200,000 General Fund was added to the agency’s [Department of Land Conservation and Development, DLCD] budget to support rulemaking and related activities.  In addition, $350,000 General Fund was appropriated to the Department for distribution to Jackson, Josephine, and Douglas counties through intergovernmental agreements. The counties will use these funds to complete technical studies, mapping, and preparation of materials required for preparing a petition to the Land Conservation and Development Commission for rulemaking to consider regional definitions of agricultural and forest lands.  

When I asked Steve McCoy of 1000 Friends of Oregon what this meant, he explained to me that a Governor's executive order or agency rulemaking can't go beyond existing law. Since HB 4095 didn't pass, this means that whatever DLCD and Jackson, Josephine, and Douglas counties do with their $550,000, it will only be what's already allowed under current land use laws.

So if six county commissioners in those southern Oregon counties decide they want to pave over farm or forest land in a fashion that isn't permitted by Oregon statute, they won't be able to. Thus the Ways and Means committee handed them over half a million dollars to do what they can do currently.

Crazy. Shenanigan'ish. 

Why didn't the legislature use the $550,000 to fund schools, keep state troopers protecting our highways, or provide inhome health care for seniors? Why give the money to three counties to come up with regional definitions of farm and forest lands when this could have been done by them at any time in the past?

Again, I don't know.

Likely Democratic leadership and the Governor's Office threw Republicans this bone in the course of end-of-session legislative horsetrading. Which sucks. Because holding good bills hostage so that bad bills can be passed is bad legislating.

I'm disappointed this happened. In an overly optimistic previous blog post, written before I learned about the HB 4095 shenanigans, I said:

Much of the Republican "jobs plan" in the 2012 session centered around trashing irreplaceable farm and forest lands for illusory short-term economic gain. Thankfully, neither the Oregon legislature nor Governor Kitzhaber fell for this B.S.

Well, I was wrong. In part, they did.

The above-mentioned budget item doesn't change the criteria for defining farm and forest land, as HB 4095 would have, but it still gives opponents of our land use system $550,000 to play around with unnecessarily. 

Republican state Rep. Matt Wingard said on a post-session radio show that Gov. Kitzhaber likely soon will be announcing an executive order to reform Oregon's land use system. That's a stretch, since as noted above the Governor is bound to comply with existing laws.

Bill Post Show 3-6-12

But the budget note and forthcoming executive order put some wind in the sails of those who want to dismantle Oregon's environmental laws bit by bit.

They can claim that some counties now will have more local control over land use decisions, even though the control counties have after the 2012 legislative session is exactly the same as they had before.

Is this worth wasting $550,000 of precious taxpayer money? Is this worth engaging in backroom shenanigans which made a mockery of the normal legislative bill-making process? I say No. 

Here's how 1000 Friends of Oregon sums up the current state of affairs:

On the final day of the session, the final budget rebalance bill included $550,000 for DLCD and the three counties for work “related to regional land use planning activities.” We will be working with the Governor, his staff, LCDC, the Department of Land Conservation and Development, and the counties to make sure that this money is spent in a way that supports the resource economies of Southern Oregon. We will keep you posted on opportunities to help shape this conversation.

 

Oregon's environment survives GOP attacks in 2012 session

Whew. That's my one-word environmentalist reaction to the end of Oregon's first ever regular "shorty" legislative session in an even-numbered year.

My wife and I were afraid that Republican efforts to undermine our state's land use, endangered species, and forest management laws would succeed in the speeded up craziness of an abbreviated session -- where public hearings often were a sham and last minute deals on important bills were the norm.

But overall, I'm happy.

My biggest personal concern was HB 4095, a totally unnecessary bill that would have allowed three southern Oregon counties to essentially opt out of the statewide land use system, substituting their own politically-inspired definitions of farm and forest land.

("If it can be paved over, it isn't worth growing crops or trees on" is the truthful desired definition, but Republican county commissioners would have come up with sneakier ways of saying the same thing.)

That bill didn't go anywhere, praise be to the Joint Ways and Means Committee. Likely efforts will be made to revive a reincarnation of HB 4095 in the next session. Hopefully in 2013 Dems will have broken the 30-30 tie in the House in their favor and increased the Democratic Senate majority.

My wife, Laurel, went to the legislature and testified against a bill aimed at overriding the successful citizen initiative against using dogs to hunt cougars, and also against another bill (HB 4158) which bizarrely would have authorized the killing of wolves in order to preserve them under the state's endangered species act.

Both failed. Way to go, Laurel!

Now the lawsuit filed by Oregon Wild and other organizations against the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) can go forward in the Court of Appeals without political interference. A legal hold has been put on the killing of a wolf in eastern Oregon which supposedly has been killing cattle. 

However, ranchers need to show that they've tried non-lethal means of deterring wolf attacks before a member of this endangered species can be killed. The lawsuit presented strong evidence that this hasn't happened, and ODFW has been too eager to pull the trigger. 

Much of the Republican "jobs plan" in the 2012 session centered around trashing irreplaceable farm and forest lands for illusory short-term economic gain. Thankfully, neither the Oregon legislature nor Governor Kitzhaber fell for this B.S.

Kitzhaber was opposed to a bill that authorized increased clear-cutting of timber on state lands. It failed, as did some other misguided G.O.P. efforts to revive rural economies. Earth to Republicans: the money problems of rural Oregon counties aren't going to be solved by doing away with environmental protections and engaging in unsustainable forest management practices. Thinning fireprone forests makes more sense than cutting old growth.

Nor is farming in eastern Oregon going to be helped much by taking lots of water from the Columbia River -- another G.O.P. "jobs" bill which met a well-earned demise. This is an idea which has some merit, if implemented wisely, but it needs a lot more study than was possible in the short 2012 session. 

The biggest lesson to take away from the past month's legislative deliberations is how important elections are. And voting is. In 2010 Kitzhaber won over Republican Chris Dudley by only 22,238 votes, 1.5% of the electorate.

Imagine what an environmental disaster the past two legislative sessions would have been if Oregon was led by Governor Dudley and Republicans were in control of the state House and Senate (currently 30-30 and 16-14 D-R).

Republicans don't understand that economic development and protection of natural resources go hand in hand. For some reason conservation has become a dirty word to conservatives. However, without a healthy, vibrant, productive Earth, where do they think long-term economic growth is going to come from?

Not from fantasy land, where a good share of G.O.P. legislators reside these days.

(Here's a overview of the 2012 legislative session from the green viewpoint of 1000 Friends of Oregon.)

Religions shouldn't get unfair business advantages

Reading over some piled-up Oregonian's, I just came across a letter from a Salem resident, James M. Schultz, about the debate over whether religious institutions should have to comply with the same laws and regulations that govern other businesses.

Great letter, Mr. Schultz.

I hadn't thought about the "competitive advantage" argument -- just how absurdly unworkable it would be if every person or organization could claim an exemption from laws on moral or ethical grounds.

Here's the February 25 letter to the editor:

Regarding the current debate over religion and insurance coverage for contraceptives, the First Amendment says, in relevant part, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

This simple phrase bars our government from interfering in how various religions choose to worship or to practice their faith. However, this restriction becomes less clear when religions move beyond their houses of worship and into the public marketplace, for instance, by opening hospitals.

Thus, if businesses in general are required to include contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance plans, church-owned hospitals gain an unfair advantage over their competitors if the government exempts them from this requirement. Such an exemption would, in effect, amount to "respecting an establishment of religion" -- a clear violation of the First Amendment.

Our constitutional protections that protect churches from government interference (and vice versa) lose their applicability -- or should -- when churches compete with other businesses.

James Huffman wrongly attacks Oregon land use system

I'm surprised how badly James Huffman, a dean emeritus of the Lewis and Clark law school, misinterpreted the highly successful Oregon land use system in a misguided opinion piece in today's Oregonian.

"Keep the messy politics: rule by government experts is a recipe for tyranny" reflects the overblown rhetoric of the sky is falling! Tea Party types. They see left-wing dangers, conspiracies, and constitutional threats hiding in the shadows everywhere.

Only problem is, when you ask them to specifically point them out, providing factual examples of dictatorial, tyrannical government over-reaching, they get tongue-tied. Why? Because their scary hobgoblins exist only in their own minds.

Huffman believes that "experts" (eek! knowledgeable people! frightening!) are controlling Oregon's land use decisions. Not the elected officials who hire and manage those experts. Not the voters who put those elected officials into office. Not the legislators who passed the land use laws those experts implement.

The Oregonian editorial board suggests a siren to warn when "legislators try to take over management of the state's natural resources" (“Water, trees and politics,” Feb. 16). On the opposite page, columnist Dave Lister describes how voters in Clackamas County are taking over bridge projects, urban renewal districts and light rail. Maybe there should be a siren to warn of such voter interference, as well. 

How dare the elected representatives in Salem interfere with expert management of state-owned forests or Columbia River water! And surely the transportation and land-use planners know better than the voters of Clackamas County. 

But wait. Don't we live in a democratic republic? Doesn't all government authority, at all levels of government, derive from the people? 

Yes, Mr. Huffman, it does. And that's exactly what is happening in Oregon: government agencies are carrying out the will of the people regarding land use decisions. 

Huffman doesn't offer up any examples of rogue "experts" doing nasty, illegal stuff. Professional planners act in accordance with laws, regulations, ordinances, and such. If they do something outside of legal bounds, those acts can be challenged in court.

Having read a number of Huffman's Oregonian opinion pieces about the evils of land use planning, I can confidently say that what he really is disturbed about is the very ideal that he extols: government authority derived from the people.

Senate Bills 100 and 101, which brought Oregon's land use system into being, were passed by a democratically elected state legislature, at the urging of a democratically elected Republican governor, Tom McCall.

Since, opponents of land use planning have tried to dismantle our state's demonstrably effective approach to preserving farm and forest land, while allowing room for cities to expand in a thoughtful fashion.

The people have spoken, most recently in 2007 with the passage of Measure 49 -- which markedly scaled back the "pave it over" aspirations of Measure 37 by a vote of 62% in favor. This rankles Huffman, who was strongly against Measure 49, opposing it via a misleading mailing. 

After it passed, Huffman criticized democracy and the "tyranny of the majority." His dream is to have activist judges declare Oregon's voter-approved land use laws to be unconstitutional.

So it's bizarre that Huffman is now inveighing about a fantasized tyranny of experts when he has expressed such a strong desire for a tyranny of judges to step in and do away with Oregon's highly popular land use system.

If there's any tyranny Oregonians should be concerned about, it's the tyranny of extreme government-haters like Huffman who want our state to return to an archaic pioneer mentality where anybody can do anything they want with their property, regardless of how this affects other people, neighboring landowners, the environment, or irreplaceable farm and forest land.

Statesman Journal should dig deeper into Courthouse Square

A few days ago I suggested some issues the Salem Statesman Journal should unleash some investigative reporting on. Among them was numero uno:

(1) The role of the three current Republican county commissioners in letting construction defects at Courthouse Square go unattended to for so long, until the building was declared unusable. Cracks, settling, and such were evident early on. Whenever this has been noted in stories about Courthouse Square, the questioning of commissioners on this subject isn't pursued by the reporter. Why not?

I appreciate how Michael Rose, the SJ reporter who has done some fine work on uncovering how the Courthouse Square debacle resulted in an unusable newly built building/transit mall in the heart of downtown Salem (Oregon), responded via some Twitter messages.

But Rose failed to point out any of his reporting that was focused on what I said above: why didn't county commissioners Sam Brentano, Patti Milne, and Janet Carlson immediately deal with the construction problems that became obvious even before Courthouse Square opened in 2000, and which were even more obvious throughout 2002?

In one of his stories,"Courthouse Square's Red Flags," Rose led off with:

When cracks appeared at the tops of columns during construction of Courthouse Square in 2000, the defects were taken seriously by Melvin Mark Development Co., a Portland firm hired as a project manager.

The cracks were in critical locations beneath the bus mall at Courthouse Square. Melvin Mark wanted to be "absolutely certain the structural integrity of the bus mall has not been, and will not be, compromised," the company stated in a Feb. 18, 2000, letter to the project's architect.

Melvin Mark recommended getting a second engineering opinion about the cracks. Marion County and transit district officials agreed, according to a February letter from Melvin Mark to Arbuckle Costic Architects.

That second opinion was never received. In fact, it was never even sought.

Instead, Mike Hayford, the structural engineer who designed Courthouse Square, was summoned by county and transit officials. He proclaimed in a July 11, 2000, letter that the cracks were "cosmetic in nature and need only be patched and or epoxy-injected."

Ten years after Hayford's assurances, city building and safety officials ordered the evacuation of the Courthouse Square office building and the closure of the adjoining bus mall. Engineers now say the cracks were a symptom of structural problems that a shot of epoxy didn't cure.

Download Courthouse Square's Red Flags

In 2000, current Marion County commissioner Patti Milne was in office. Yet to my knowledge the Statesman Journal has never reported why she and other county officials ignored the warnings of the Courthouse Square project manager, instead trusting the guy who was reponsible for designing the building.

The Statesman Journal has tirelessly dug into records of the Willamette Educational Service District and demanded that the state make public personal information of every PERS retiree.

So I'd like to see the newspaper be equally committed to laying bare every bit of written and email correspondence to and from Marion County officials, elected and otherwise, regarding construction defects apparent in Courthouse Square from February 2000 onward (cracked walls and concrete pillars, settling paving stones, leaking windows, etc.).

Also, to interview those officials. What did they know? When did they know it? Who decided to ignore the problems? 

This isn't the first time I've asked these sorts of questions in a blog post. Here's some excerpts from my 2010 "Lessons of Salem's Courthouse Square debacle."

Who says nothing interesting ever happens in Salem (Oregon)? Well, I do, a lot.

But ever since it was reported that recently constructed Courthouse Square -- a building that houses most county offices, along with the downtown transit mall -- is in serious danger of falling down, things have been popping in the local newspaper.

Today the Statesman Journal ran a bunch of stories and opinion pieces about this debacle. The $34 million building, which takes up an entire block, is being vacated as quickly as possible. It might not be repairable.

Yet it opened just ten years ago, in 2000, when one of the three current Republican county commissioners, Patti Milne, was in office. The other commissioners came along a bit later, Janet Carlson in 2002 and Sam Brentano in 2003.

All of them are open to the eminently justifiable criticism that they fiddled around while Courthouse Square came ever closer to falling to the ground.

Somehow I suspect that if three Democratic commissioners had overseen this massive waste of taxpayer money (structural problems became apparent in 2002, but were never effectively addressed), the Chamber of Commerce-dominated Statesman Journal would be a lot harder on the politicians in charge.

Now, I'm not saying that news coverage decisions at the Statesman Journal are related to editorial positiions. However, many readers of the newspaper believe this is the case. So I'm not saying, but other people do.

It's a fact that the Statesman Journal editorial board endorsed Patti Milne for re-election in 2010 over her Democratic opponent, Jason Freilinger, who made Milne's "fiddling while Rome burns" attitude toward Courthouse Square part of his campaign. 

And it's a fact that the Statesman Journal editorial board opposed a citizen initiative to add two commissioners to the Marion County Board, and make the commissioner positions non-partisan. This was intended to improve decision-making on the currently over-cozy board, where two people control important county policies.

My main point, though, is that the public deserves to know why construction defects at Courthouse Square were brushed off as unimportant for so long by county officials when they first became apparent. 

Heck, whenever my wife and I have work done on our home (like new windows being installed), we always check out the quality of what we paid for. If there's a problem, we contact whoever did the work and make sure it is fixed.

The Marion County commissioners, all of whom are still in office, didn't do that when Courthouse Square started to fall apart as soon as it was constructed. Since it now looks like it could cost more to repair the project than it cost to build it, and some $20 million is still owed on Courthouse Square, the public deserves all the facts about what went wrong.

Oregon cougar hunting bill is dead. Long live cougars!

Great news for those who value wildness, ecological diversity, and sound science (rather than hysterical fearmongering).

We just got an email from Predator Defense saying that HB 4119, the bill to repeal the twice-passed citizen initiative which bans cougar hunting with dogs, is dead in the 2012 Oregon legislative session.

GREAT NEWS!

GOVERNOR KITZHABER HAS INFORMED REP. SPRENGER, THE SPONSOR OF THE BILL HB 4119 TO REPEAL MEASURE 18 AND BRING HOUND HUNTING OF COUGARS BACK, THAT HE HAS NO INTENTION OF SIGNING IT!

PLEASE CONTACT THE GOVERNOR AND THANK HIM FOR STEPPING UP TO THE PLATE FOR OREGON VOTERS AND COUGARS.

http://governor.oregon.gov/Gov/contact.shtml  503-378-4582

"Let just one woman speak" (about contraception)

 

 A 1 1/2 minute video of the Republican effort to squash the voices of women and uncrazy Catholics shows how outrageous G.O.P. attempts to politicize basic preventive health care has become.

The photo above shows who Darrell Issa (R-California) believes should command women's birth control decisions.

Watch how Democratic Representatives urge the committee to "let one woman speak."

 

House GOP and Schaufler holding Oregon health care bill hostage

This is how politicians drive citizens crazy and get super-low approval ratings.

Republicans in the House of Representatives, along with quasi-Democrat Rep. Mike Schaufler, have blocked approval of Oregon's health insurance exchange, seemingly in an attempt to get some crappy bills passed by holding this much-needed bill hostage.

The state budget isn't affected by the health care bill. Billions of dollars in federal funding is at stake. Competition between insurance companies, supposedly a GOP priority, will be greatly enhanced. 

But since the health care bill is so good for Oregon, Schaufler and his Republican buddies want to make sure that some bad bills are passed before giving up on their hostage-taking.

Democrats protested that the exchange would be funded by federal money as well as insurance fees, and would not affect the state budget. Rep. Peter Buckley, D-Ashland, said no questions had been raised in earlier committee hearings, and said he was "confused" and had "great sorrow ... that our process is moving in this direction."

"I just hope as we're doing this vote and others going forward that we're making it on the merits of the bill in question and not in the hopes to take bills hostage to trade them for other things," said Rep. Jefferson Smith, D-Portland.

Yeah, me too, Jefferson. But I'm pretty sure Schaufler is thinking of HB 4095, along with other "pave it over" bills that would trash protections for Oregon's farm and forest lands, when he said this:

Rep. Mike Schaufler, D-Happy Valley, said he would support the motion because he wanted to make sure bills creating jobs, regarding timber and water policy, passed the House before the exchange does.

I sure hope Gov. Kitzhaber and Democrats in the state legislature hold firm on their principles. Make the Republicans and Schaufler vote against the health care bill. Hold them accountable for the horrible effects of losing out on a chance to markedly lower health costs in Oregon and insure many more people.

Don't allow hostage taking.

This happens with bills in Congress all the time -- one reason, among many, why people are so fed up with what goes on in Washington, DC. The last thing we need is for the Oregon legislature to become as dysfunctional as the federal Congress.

Scalia says religious groups have to follow the law

Amazing. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia agrees with President Obama and other progressives about something: that religious organizations which enter into commercial activity have to follow the same laws everybody else does.

We have never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition.

When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.

Just like I said. When you get to nominate another Supreme Court justice in your second term, President Obama, keep me in mind.

I'm clearly qualified, along with an evident majority of people of people in this country who believe that contraception should be available under their health insurance plan to employees of organizations run by religions which provide services to the general public. 

Wolf-phobic ranchers need therapy, not HB 4158

Eastern Oregon ranchers, my wife and I want to send you some healing thoughts: You don't need to suffer from your fear of wolves. Really. Breathe in...breathe out. Embrace reality. You're safe. There's no wolf at the door. Little Red Riding Hood is a fairy tale.

Unfortunately, so far the ranchers and other wolf-phobic Oregonians haven't gotten the therapy that they need. House Bill 4158 is evidence. Introduced in this month's mini-legislative session, it "allows killing of wolves to address depredation of livestock."

I guess the sponsors of the bill, which was introduced at the request of the Oregon Cattlemen's Association, were so busy locking their doors and putting in wolf-proof security systems they didn't take time to find out that the Oregon Wolf Plan already allows for killing of wolves -- but only after non-lethal preventive measures have been attempted.

Earlier this year, wolves lost federal Endangered Species Act protection via a congressional budget rider. Shortly after, Oregon Fish and Wildlife ordered the killing of two additional wolves in response to a series of livestock losses blamed on the Imnaha Pack. Following those killings, some members of the pack dispersed, leaving just four members, two of which were the target of the most recent kill order. Under the state wildlife agency’s management, Oregon’s wolf population has dropped from 21 to 14 this year due to lethal control, poaching, dispersal and the accidental death of a young female after Fish and Wildlife staff fit her with a radio collar.

Some of the groups involved in today’s lawsuit had originally supported the management plan as a compromise because it required landowners to adopt nonlethal measures before lethal control could be carried out. The groups, however, have become increasingly frustrated by the wildlife agency’s willingness to shoot wolves in response to political pressure from powerful livestock industry interests, including the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association.

As the above excerpt from an October 2011 Center for Biological Diversity press release points out, the Oregon Wolf Plan permits killing of wolves as a last resort. Which is as it should be. Wolves still are an endangered species under Oregon law. They are highly beneficial to ecosystems. 

And they barely affect the bottom-line of ranchers. 

To keep this in perspective, consider some of the stats: In 2011, wolves killed 25 cows, while 55,000 were lost to weather, disease and thieves in 2010. In the rare instances in which livestock are lost to wolves, ranchers are reimbursed at fair market value by Oregon taxpayers.

So there's no need for HB 4158. It's a solution in search of a problem. The Oregon Court of Appeals has put a stay on the planned killing of wolves, persuaded by clear-headed environmental groups that conserving wolves under the state endangered species act isn't fostered by killing them.

HB 4158, in a marvelous display of double-speak, says that notwithstanding all that endangered species stuff in state law, "the conservation of wolves in Oregon may include the killing of wolves to address the depredation of livestock by wolves."

Kill them to protect them. These ranchers sound like wife-abusers: "Honey, I'm hitting you because I love you so much."

Again, if a wolf, or wolves, can't be stopped from killing cattle after preventive measures have been seriously attempted, my understanding is that the Oregon Wolf Plan already allows for the Department of Fish and Wildlife to shoot them under special rare circumstances.

But ranchers basically want a "shoot on sight" rule. Not all, thankfully, but enough of them to cause the Oregon Cattlemen's Association to sponsor HB 4158. To them the only good wolf is a dead wolf. Well, like I said, those ranchers need to get some therapy. 

As Oregon Wild says, "Wolves have been vilified." For no good reason.

With wolves, old myths die hard and antiquated ideologies persist. It’s taken us 50 years to shift our mind-set from extermination to tenuous acceptance, and it will likely take another 50 years for Oregonians from all backgrounds to embrace the return of wolves. In the meantime, we should all remember that wolves are just another animal trying to make their home in Oregon.

Rep. Dennis Richardson, "spam king," gets mine in return

After getting several unwanted email "newsletters" from the Oregon legislature's unchallenged Spam King, Rep. Dennis Richardson, tonight I followed the Golden Rule and sent him one of my own.

Richardson used a public records request to get hundreds of thousands of personal email addresses from the state computer system. Well, give spam and you deserve to get spam. 

Here's the email message I just sent to the Spam King. Subject: "Great offer."

Rep. Richardson, thanks for sending me another of your unwanted emails. I've sent you a "DELETE" request, but wanted you to enjoy some spam email from me. Since you've chosen to send hundreds of thousands of Oregonians your own personal spam, I figure you must like getting spam emails just as much as you enjoy sending them. 

Golden Rule, you know. Do unto others…

Glad to oblige. I'd like to give you a special offer on my book, "Return to the One," which is about the teachings of an important Greek philosopher, Plotinus. You'll have to order it from Amazon at full price. Hey, you're into job creating, and this is my horribly-paid job now that I'm retired -- writing. 

However, if you mail me the book copy that you've purchased, along with a postage paid return envelope (use book rate, it's cheaper), I'll be pleased to return you a signed copy that you can proudly display in your legislative office waiting area.

I'm sure you'll enjoy the inscription: "For Dennis, the spam king. I'm so happy to be writing something to you, rather than getting more spam crap FROM you. Warm greetings, Brian."

It's been fun exchanging spam with you. Briefly. But like I said, I've asked you to take me off your Spam Mailing List, so it looks like our spam'y relationship is over. Farewell, Dennis.

            -- Brian 

HB 4095 hearing shows dysfunction of 2012 Oregon legislature

Wow. This 2012 short session of the Oregon legislature is even more screwed-up than sessions usually are. And that's saying a lot, giving the dysfunction evident in normal legislative deliberations.

This is the first even-year session, as Oregon has done away with the archaic practice of having the legislature meet every two years. A lot needs to be accomplished in 35 days, but some (translation: mostly Republicans) are doing their best to focus on pet dream bills rather than on pressing immediate priorities.

Case in point: HB 4095, which Republicans have introduced before in different guises. It's an attempt to gut Oregon's highly successful land use system, which 62% of Oregon voters supported in 2007 by saying "Yes!" to Measure 49.

Doesn't matter to Republicans, who have this bizarre notion of "two Oregon's" in their democracy-fearing minds. Meaning, statewide votes don't count, because people in the Willamette Valley have no understanding of the supposed unique specialness of what lies geographically beyond.

So HB 4095 is an attempt to carve off three southern Oregon counties, Josephine, Jackson, and Douglas, from the statewide land use system.

Republican sponsors of the bill want politicians in these counties (just nine county commissioners) to be able to redefine "farm" and "forest" land so subdivisions and shopping centers could sprout where crops and trees grow now. 

After listening online this morning to the audio stream of the House Judiciary Committee hearing on HB 4095, I'm glad I decided to stay at home rather than testifying again against the bill, as I did on Monday. It was infuriating to hear how citizens were treated by Republican legislators, and how eager these legislators were to short-circuit what should be an open, transparent, and thoughtful bill-making process.

The charade of a public hearing reminded me of the Seven Deadly Sins, albeit with different names owing to the special nature of iniquity in the 2012 Oregon Legislature. (I've only got four; got to keep this blog post halfway short.)

Disrespect. On Monday the Republican co-chair complained about how most opponents of HB 4095 lived in the Willamette Valley. Today several people came up from southern Oregon to testify against the bill, including a Douglas County farmer who informed the committee that the Douglas County Farm Bureau successfully urged the Oregon Farm Bureau to oppose this threat to family farming.

But at first the Republicans didn't want to allow anyone to testify about the bill in general. They just wanted to hear testimony on some amendments that put off implementation of the bill until 2013. "So what if people drove for hours to testify at 8 am?," they said. "We legislators have a lot to do and can't take time to hear from the public." Fortunately, wiser minds prevailed and some people (but not all) got a few minutes to testify -- universally, I'm pretty sure, in opposition to HB 4095.

Hypocrisy. One legislator threw a mini-tantrum about how, if HB 4095 made it out of this committee, it would go to the Joint Ways and Means Committee, as apparently all bills in this short session will. He probably was upset that Democrats have a 13-12 advantage over Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee.

Also, that the $600,000 price tag of this bill will look ridiculous given that proponents of HB 4095 weren't able to provide a single perusasive reason why it is needed, given that rezoning/re-mapping of farm and forest land already is permitted under existing land use laws. The legislator wanted HB 4095 to be heard by a substantive committee.

But the House Judiciary Committee shouldn't be handling land use bills either. I've been told that HB 4095 ended up here because it had a better chance of getting out of committee (this "pave it over" concept has been rejected by committees who deliberated in a full legislative session, so proponents are hoping to ram HB 4095 through in as sneaky a fashion as possible.) Live by the sneak, die by the sneak.

Duplicity. Few had seen the amended HB 4095 before arriving at the hearing. Not even most of the legislators on the House Judiciary Committee. One plaintively said, "Shouldn't we know what we're voting on?"

Amazingly co-chair Rep. Wayne Krieger (I believe it was; couldn't be sure since I only had audio to go by) told his colleague, in effect, "Don't complain. Health and education bills are being pushed through the legislature this session, and nobody knows what these bills will do either. So deal with it."

Again, wow. Other legislators are trying to ramrod bills into passage without informed deliberations, so the House Judiciary Commitee is proud to do the same.

So what if only lobbyists such as Dave Hunnicutt of Oregonians in Action get to see amendments ahead of time? (In fact, it was noted that Hunnicutt apparently wrote the amendments.) So what if environmental organizations representing the majority of Oregonians who favor protecting farm and forest land were shut out of the process? Just trust us. And the Oregon Realtors Association, which is one of the few supporters of HB 4095.

Bad vibes. Hey, I'm a child of the '60s -- both the decade and, now, my age. A woman opposed to HB 4095 testified about how her eyes had been opened to how the Oregon Legislature operates after coming to hearings this week. She was disgusted at what she saw, previously not being familiar with what goes on in the not-so-hallowed halls of the Capitol.

I know what she means. Whenever I go in there to testify at a hearing, the atmosphere feels creepy. It's a place where lobbyists, politicians, businesspeople, and other "suits" feel comfortable. Ordinary citizens don't. For good reason, because little is done to welcome them.

As noted above, at the beginning of today's hearing the Republican co-chair tried to stop people who had come a long way from testifying at all on the substance of HB 4095. Then he made an absurd mini-speech about how he was disturbed at how previous testimony had impugned the motives of bill proponents, and he didn't want to hear any more of that sort of stuff today.

Oh, gosh. Sorry, teacher. Rap my knuckles. I'll forget about free speech and the first amendment. Forgive me for exercising my right to express my opinion about a stupid, expensive, unnecessary bill aimed at doing away with Oregon's highly popular land use system.

Fortunately, people ignored him. They spoke their minds. Forcefully, respectfully, factually.

They weren't intimidated by Republican attempts to ramrod through this poor excuse for legislation. It was approved on what I think was a 6-4 vote. Hopefully the Joint Ways and Means Committee will give HB 4095 the death that it so richly deserves.

Don't base land use laws on "two Oregon's" myth

"There are two Oregon's," said Rep. Wayne Krieger (R-Gold Beach). "The Willamette Valley and everywhere else."

[Update: Glancing at the notes I took at the meeting before the paper went into recyling, I see that I jotted down "Rep. Esquivel" next to the two Oregon's mention. So, probably was him. But I'm sure Krieger endorses that notion.]

Waiting to testify on House Bill 4095 at a Judiciary Committee hearing this morning, I thought, What is he talking about? Two Oregon's? That notion is untrue and divisive.

Unfortunately, it's also an assumption that underlies a lot of bad legislative proposals, mostly initiated by Republicans who have an almost paranoid fear that people who live in the Portland Metro area or the Willamette Valley don't understand the supposedly unique needs, values, and worldview of Oregonians who live elsewhere in the state.

Again, not true. 

Quite a few fellow testifers, along with me, took issue with Rep. Krieger in the course of our three-minute-limited remarks to the committee. Several people noted how they'd lived many years in southern or eastern Oregon before moving to a rural area in the Willamette Valley.

I said that in our rural neighborhood that's about six miles from the Salem city limits, property owners opposed to a subdivision which threatened our wells and surface water didn't think of themselves as Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or progressives.

We neighbors all agreed that land use decisions should be made fairly, through an open and transparent process, using facts and the law rather than personal political views. 

Only a few people at the hearing testified in support of HB 4095. Someone representing the Oregon Association of Realtors, for one. Dave Hunnicutt of Oregonians in Action, for two. And a woman who used to farm in Josephine County.

It's a bad bill. I submitted some brilliant (in my humble opinion) written testimony which can be marveled at by clicking on the link below.
Download HB 4095 testimony Feb 2012 

In the couple of minutes I had to summarize my opposition to this attempt to allow county commissioners in three southern Oregon counties to redefine what constitutes productive farm and forest land, I focused on how unwise it would be to politicize our state's land use system.

I said, "People in our neighborhood who bought property and built homes figured that adjacent farm land wouldn't be arbitrarily rezoned by some county commissioners who ignored facts, basing their decision merely on a feeling that construction of a subdivision should be allowed."

I'm sure the same is true of most people everywhere in Oregon. We don't want politicians messing around with rezoning farm and forest land unless there's a good reason to do so. 

Short-term economic problems isn't one of those reasons. A woman opposed to HB 4095 (who farms in the Willamette Valley) spoke movingly of how, fifty years from now, we'll regret losing irreplaceable farmland through short-sighted actions today.

Others said that Southern Oregon's high unemployment isn't going to be solved by allowing developers to pave over farm and forest land. I'm pretty sure Jackson, Josephine, and Douglas counties aren't running out of homesites, small acreages, and industrial land. People need jobs; taking farm and forest land out of production will be a step backward in this regard.

State law, via 2009's HB 2229, already allows counties to re-map inaccurately designated farm and forest lands. Meaning, if a parcel isn't truly suitable for farming or timber production, its designation can be changed.

Oregon's land use goals allow for a lot of flexibility. In 2007 over 60% of Oregon voters affirmed their desire to preserve farm and forest lands through their passage of Measure 49. As someone testifying in opposition to HB 4095 said, these are "industrial" lands -- job-creating and income-producing.

But the proponents of HB 4095 want clusters of counties to be able to come up with their own definitions of farm and forest land. Huh? I don't get it. 

Do crops and trees grow under different biological rules in southern Oregon? Are the laws of nature somehow different there? Again, Oregon's land use laws already allow for considerable flexibility, based on geography, soil types, and such.

Opponents of our state's highly successful efforts to preserve "resource" (farm/forest) lands and keep cities from needlessly sprawling onto them want to dismantle our land use laws. HB 4095 is a step in that direction.

Hopefully it will be voted down by people who reject the notion of "two Oregon's."

If you live in Oregon and want to express your opposition to HB 4095, 1000 Friends of Oregon explains how to do this:

Why 1000 Friends opposes this bill: HB 4095 could allow sprawling subdivisions on lands that have been in continuous farm or forest use for generations. This bill would, for example, allow LCDC to craft a definition of agricultural and forest lands that would allow counties to redesignate all lands near highways and urban growth boundaries (UGB) as "non-resource," even if they are still in active production.

Since most Oregon cities are located amid the state's most productive resource lands, protecting farmland around them is a fundamental mission of Oregon's land use program.  Increased uncertainty for farm operators near UGBs will cause them to decrease investments in their lands, bringing valuable agriculture land out of production and making farming even more difficult for their neighbors. Furthermore, taking farms and forest lands out of production will cost Oregon jobs.

The bill would also add unnecessary complexity to the land use program. If Southern Oregon counties require a new definition of agricultural and forest lands specifically reflecting the usability of such lands for resource uses, current law provides the means to do so. Also, re-mapping of lands that do not meet the definition of agricultural land or forest land is already possible under HB 2229, passed by the Legislature in 2009. However, no county has taken advantage of that authorization. This bill is not only bad policy, it is simply unnecessary.

Status: The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on this bill at 8:00am Monday, February 6.  Please contact the co-chairs of this Committee and your own legislator to tell them you oppose this bill. You can reach co-chair Rep. Jeff Barker at 503-986-1428 or rep.jeffbarker@state.or.us, and Co-Chair Rep. Wayne Krieger at 503-986-1401 or rep.waynekrieger@state.or.us. You can find your own legislator's contact info on this page.

Shame! Komen for the Cure politicizes cancer

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation's outrageous decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening efforts is a case study in disastrous public relations. Overnight, Komen for the Cure went from "great public-spirited organization" to "handmaiden of right-wing crazies" in the minds of countless Americans.

Like me.

Until the Planned Parenthood defunding hit the Internet airwaves, I hadn't paid much attention to Komen for the Cure. A couple of times a year I'd see a positive story on the evening news about women (and some men) dressed in pink running together to raise funds and publicize the fight against breast cancer.

I'd think "What's not to like?" Now, I'm furious at Komen for the Cure. I've emailed them directly.

My wife and I will never donate to your organization again, and we will urge other families who have suffered breast cancer deaths to do the same. (My wife's sister recently died.) Your stand against Planned Parenthood is absurdly political, given how PP is dedicated to breast cancer screening. Shame on you. We'll now contribute in my wife's sister's name to Planned Parenthood. Why don't you just become an arm of the Republican Party, as one of your top executives apparently is?

I've also signed on to several organized email efforts aimed at pressuring Komen for the Cure to reverse their jihad against Planned Parenthood, including the Daily Kos campaign. Watching a self-serving, utterly unbelievable video explanation by the Komen founder and CEO didn't make me feel any better about the organization.

It just showed that in addition to Komen for the Cure being a tool of rabid Planned Parenthood haters, Nancy Brinker and other top leaders can't be trusted to tell the truth.

They're trying to claim that the decision to defund Planned Parenthood had nothing to do with pressure from right-to-life groups. That's B.S. A story in the Atlantic describes how a Komen official resigned after she learned about the planned cave-in to political pressure.

The decision to create a rule that would cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to these sources, was driven by the organization's new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, a former gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is "pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood." (The Komen grants to Planned Parenthood did not pay for abortion or contraception services, only cancer detection, according to all parties involved.) 

...The decision, made in December, caused an uproar inside Komen. Three sources told me that the organization's top public-health official, Mollie Williams, resigned in protest immediately following the Komen board's decision to cut off Planned Parenthood. Williams, who served as the managing director of community-health programs, was responsible for directing the distribution of $93 million in annual grants. Williams declined to comment when I reached her yesterday on whether she had resigned her position in protest, and she declined to speak about any other aspects of the controversy.

But John Hammarley, who until recently served as Komen's senior communications adviser and who was charged with managing the public-relations aspects of Komen's Planned Parenthood grant, said that Williams believed she could not honorably serve in her position once Komen had caved to pressure from the anti-abortion right. "Mollie is one of the most highly respected and ethical people inside the organization, and she felt she couldn't continue under these conditions," Hammarley said. "The Komen board of directors are very politically savvy folks, and I think over time they thought if they gave in to the very aggressive propaganda machine of the anti-abortion groups, that the issue would go away. It seemed very shortsighted to me."

Well, the Komen board should fire themselves, along with Handel, Brinker, and everyone else who knowingly wrecked the Komen for the Cure "brand" in the name of anti-abortion insanity.

Insanity, because everybody agrees breast cancer is a bad thing. Planned Parenthood, though, is popular. Only 2-3% of visits to Planned Parenthood clinics are abortion related. So Komen for the Cure has thrown away a lot of good will. Now, every time I see a pink ribbon or other Komen symbol, I'll think "American Taliban." 

Abortion is legal. The Supreme Court has ruled that it is a constitutional right. Nonetheless, federal funds aren't used for abortions. And none of the Koben for the Cure funds which went to Planned Parenthood paid for abortions. They were used to prevent breast cancer.

But rabid religious right-wingers, who I like to call our American Taliban, are fanatics. They don't want anyone to give any money to Planned Parenthood, because since they mistakenly consider abortion to be an evil, everything that Planned Parenthood does is wicked according to their twisted fundamentalist minds.

Hopefully corporations which have been supporting Komen for the Cure will realize that pink is no longer a feel-good color. 

Check out list after list after list of Komen’s corporate sponsors. Do you think New Balance, Ford and Georgia-Pacific signed on for a public fight over Planned Parenthood? When Yoplait put a pink lid on its yogurt, did they do it to make it easier to boycott their products? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Unlike most boycotts, it’s easy to figure out which products you shouldn’t buy: anything that displays a pink ribbon with the Komen name.

(John and ABL have already posted about this if you’re wondering what I’m talking about.)

The backlash has begun.

And I think it'll keep on lashing. "A Painful Betrayal" tells it like it is. Komen for the Cure has stimulated a huge amount of utterly justified outrage. If Komen doesn't reverse itself, soon, the foundation is going to end up being a shadow of its former self.

Which would be unfortunate, because cancer is the enemy, not Planned Parenthood. 

"Expansionary austerity" isn't working in Europe

I'm no economic expert. But much of economics is simple common sense.

So it's no big surprise to me that the British economy is faltering after David Cameron's conservative government decided several years ago that cutting government spending in a recession was the best way to stimulate growth and job creation.

Huh? This "expansionary austerity" notion is another example of faith-based voodoo economics, like believing that cutting taxes results in more revenue. That's also a myth.

Recently Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote about Europe's continuing economic problems that have been exacerbated by austerity measures. "The Austerity Debacle" shows why it's so important that the United States shun crazy Republican calls for extreme deficit-cutting when our own economy is finally starting to improve.

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

...Such invocations of the confidence fairy were never plausible; researchers at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere quickly debunked the supposed evidence that spending cuts create jobs. Yet influential people on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on the prophets of austerity, Mr. Cameron in particular, because the doctrine of expansionary austerity dovetailed with their ideological agendas.

...The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist — or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook “Economics” — could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea. But policy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know. And millions of workers are paying the price for their willful amnesia.

Hopefully next November those millions will remember which political party favors job creation for the 99% rather than tax and spending cuts which benefit the 1%: the Democrats.

(For some other arguments against expansionary austerity, see here and here.)

Eugene girls sue Kitzhaber over climate change inaction

Here's four big Green Thumbs-Up from my wife and me to Eugene residents Olivia Chernaik, 11, and Kelsey Juliana, 15. The Register Guard reports:

...with the help of their mothers, Lisa Chernaik and Catia Juliana, [the girls] filed a lawsuit against the state of Oregon and Gov. John Kitzhaber, accusing them of violating their duties to uphold the public trust and to protect the state’s atmosphere, water, land, fishery and wildlife resources from the impacts of climate change.

Excellent! The lawsuit is being brought under the aegis of iMatter, a group that encourages kids to get involved in the fight to preserve their future from the very real threat of global warming.

 

Pretty darn simple. Too bad so many adults don't grasp these truths.

Like a good share of the membership of the Oregon chapter of the American Meteorological Society, who, bizarrely, have their heads firmly in the sand of global warming denial. The genuine scientists in this bunch must be hugely embarrassed by the antics of their anti-scientific colleagues. 

Earth to the Oregon Chapter: your parent group, the American Meteorological Society, strongly affirms the reality of human-caused global warming, as does every reputable scientific organization in the world. 

Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond.

Focusing on the next 30 years, convergence among emission scenarios and model results suggest strongly that increasing air temperatures will reduce snowpack, shift snowmelt timing, reduce crop production and rangeland fertility, and cause continued melting of the ice caps and sea level rise.

It's embarassing to Oregon that we have so many adults, including professional meteorologists, who don't understand the science of global warming. Hopefully they'll learn from the children and grow up, scientifically.

Salem's Todd Davidson heading up international tourism efforts

One of our neighbors here in rural south Salem has become a celebrity -- in the tourism promotion world. Recently President Obama announced at Walt Disney World that Todd Davidson will lead an effort to increase international tourism through the U.S. Tourism and Travel Advisory Board. 

Here's a KGW story about Todd's appointment (after a brief ad). 

Davidson is CEO of Travel Oregon, which has been successful in boosting tourism in our state.

"The travel industry is an important part of Oregon's economy," said Governor Kitzhaber. "Appointing Todd Davidson to Chair the U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board was an excellent selection. Todd is a thoughtful and effective leader who will continue to promote Oregon's tourism advantages in his national position."

Davidson was appointed Executive Director of Travel Oregon in June 1996 and was named Chief Executive Officer in September 2004. Under his leadership, the tourism industry in Oregon has flourished into an $8.7 billion industry that employs more than 90,000 Oregonians; in 2011 more than 8,000 jobs were created. 

Way to go, Todd!

I've got some great ideas for luring international tourists to our very own neighborhood, Spring Lake Estates, which those of us who have lived here for a long time like to call "Poison Oak Estates." There's got to be an untapped market of people who want to experience some of the world's largest and most potent poison oak vines.

I'm visualizing busloads of Japanese (and other) tourists pulling up to vacant lots in our neighborhood after they've had their fill of the Woodburn Mall. We'd give them white jumpsuits to put on, complete with masks and gloves.

Then we'd go on a walking tour of our amazing poison oak forests. There'd be some exciting acrobatic acts featuring scantily clad attractive guys and gals who would do their thing above, below, and around dense thickets of poison oak. And every one of them would be super-allergic to it!

Thrill a minute. We'd sell souvenir poison oak leaves enclosed in plastic, suitable for a necklace, earrings, or gift to someone you can't stand.

Anyway, Todd, feel free to give me a call when the Tourism Advisory Board starts discussing plans to increase international tourism. If you meet at Walt Disney World, where I hear you shook Obama's hand, I'll just have to put country first and accept an all-expenses trip to consult with the Board. 

Adventurer of the Year 2012: 65 year old Jon Turk

 

Way to go, Jon! At the age of 65, you're nominated for National Geographic's Adventurers of the Year 2012 award, along with Erik Boomer, a youthful 26. (Jon Turk is on the left in the photo above.)

You've inspired this 63 year-old.

Unlike you, I'll never be the first to circumnavigate Canada's frosty Ellesmere Island, dragging my sea kayak overland for a good share of the 1,500 miles, risking death in ice-choked seas, encountering curious wolves and polar bears.

But you've reminded me that us geezers have a lot more living to do, regardless of our Social Security-eligible age. 

The New York Times has a fascinating story about Turk and Boomer's adventure, "Where the Sun Never Sets." And the National Geographic piece about them is here.

There's only one more day left to vote for Turk and Boomer to be Adventurers of the Year. Do it. Today. Tomorrow, vote again. I didn't even check to see what the other nominees did.

Doing what Turk accomplished at 65 got him my vote. 

In 2012, let's elect Canada as president

Great news! The Canada Party has entered our presidential race. I'd vote for Canada to be the leader of the United States, for sure. 

This is a highly persausive campaign video.

 

But seriously... (though I hope, oh, I so dearly hope, Canada will run for president), other countries have a hell of a lot to teach the United States. We aren't #1 in anything related to quality of life. 

It's a fact.

Check out the OECD's Better Life Initiative web site (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Quality of life rankings for most of the world's developed economies, along with some emerging economies, start off with each topic area ranked equally.

Click on "by rank) in the lower right corner of the display, and you'll see that currently the United States is #7, with Canada #2. Go, Canada! Beat out Australia and you're #1!

So if we were more like Canada, our well-being would be much better. Sure, we'd have to develop a taste for hockey (ugh), but I'm up for that in exchange for universal health care and other Canadian goodies.

See what happens when you leave ten of the quality of life topics at the "1" level, and one by one, give a single topic a "5" (most important). You'll find that the United States isn't tops in anything, notwithstanding how often people in this country erroneously say, "This is the greatest country in the world."

No, we aren't. Canada is. Or maybe France.

Regardless, it makes a lot of sense to elect another country to be our President, since we're way behind other nations in just about everything except incarceration rates.

On a related note, Nicholas Kristof correctly asks why Europe is a dirty word in our political discourse. Beats me. Europeans get to watch much racier and funnier commercials that we do, so let's elect Europe vice-president.